We are just a group of retired spooks that discuss things that you’ll not find anywhere else. It makes us unique. Take a look around. Learn a thing or two.
I have been experimenting with AI. I have been making movies, asking questions, and generating all sorts of art. Today we will chat about my latest adventure…
I played around with it, used the Haddock style (Tin Tin clone) and ended up with this…
Then I tried again with a “flying saucer” preset.
Check out the results… The block to the right never managed to generate… sigh.
It’s fun.
Worth your time to visit and try your hand at it.
Easy . All you need is a story line, and some dialog to add.
Today…
Have you ever been banned from a place due to your behavior?
The AT&T store. My mom had died in a car accident, and it was left up to me to close her accounts and different things like that, after grieving a couple weeks I got started. She had bought an IPad and for probably nearly a decade had AT&T service for it as my parents didn’t have WiFi. I called them and told them, my mom is dead. Please cancel auto pay from her bank account. THEY REFUSED. The person had no sympathy at all. I asked for a supervisor, and they said go to a certain store, they would call there and say to cancel.
I go to the store and when I tell them the situation, nobody would touch it. Finally a call came and they said OK now it has to be approved by corporate (or some stupid answer like that). Two months go by and they kept taking 39.95 out of her bank account. I call them AGAIN, and they say go back to this store with her death certificate (which I just received). I go back and am treated like shit. The manager was a snotty little snip who barely looked at the death certificate and her two beta male minions shrugged me off when I asked if this would finally end this bullshit. They basically ignored me and turned away. I blew my stack, finally. I started shouting to everyone in the store to not get AT&T because they will charge you even if you are dead. That they are stealing my dead mothers money and these assholes don’t care. The little bitch manager said for me to leave, and I got in her face..how would she feel if her dead mother was getting robbed and nobody gave a shit?? Anyway the police came, they were actually sympathetic and I went to my moms bank still crying. Due to having her death certificate + administration of estate credentials the bank stopped the auto payment. A few days later got a letter addressed to my mother’s estate demanding payment from AT&T. The IPad was not used since she died. They had already gotten three months of payment from a dead woman. AT&T SUCKS. Now I’m going to run on my treadmill, my adrenaline is demanding action, lol.
Awesome China
Why is the US doing such a bad job countering China’s rise?
Oh, that’s a lot of reasons.
For America:
no unified policies and strategies, every department has its own stance, and their stances may conflict each other. Like, the department of commerce wanted to continue high tariffs on Chinese products, but the department of treasury wanted China to buy American debt, this is paradoxical, you can’t ask someone to buy your goods while pointing a gun at him.
no unified benefits on “countering China”, Wall Street companies do not wish to counter China, while some domestic companies wish to. Because WS companies are financial sectors, they invest and make profit, no matter from where, but domestic companies rely on domestic market and labors, if everything can be made in China, then they die.
no unified strategies, Trump prefers solve China first, while Biden prefers solve Russia first. Given America’s strength is limited, it can’t handle both, but wavering between the two only waste precious time. And China, Russia, Muslim world, the global south won’t give America this chance, when it tried to solve one, the rest will rise up.
democratic. America’s democratic system allows people in 1, 2 and 3 can’t reach to an agreement.
no real representation of China, as many answers here pointed out, China’s image in Ameican media is twisted, which made Americans not able to make objective evaluation and correct decision. Sometimes the images are controversial, sometimes China is weak and easy to win, sometimes China is a threat…I don’t konw how come a country could be both weak and threatening at same time. However, if China is correctly and honestely reported, the politicians in WH and Capitol Hill will afraid losing power after American people found they’re fooled and manipulated, not just China, on everything.
no correct mentaility. America’s an amatuer in international politics, it adopts a zero sum mentality, which cuts off alternative options, and behaves like a red-eyed bull. Like Vietnam war, it could let the souther Vietnman go and admit it’s lost the war, but it can’t step back, so the only option is to increase the stakes, until the final collapse. Zero sum is an ideal result, but the world is complicated.
For China:
it’s big enough, so trade war can’t defeat China’s industry.
it’s advanced enough, so technology war can’t stop China’s development.
it’s strong enough, so a real war can’t defeat China and bring it kneeling in front of you.
For countering philosophy:
the correct comepetion is: you run fast, then I run faster. But America’s strategy is: you run fast, then I cripple you. Such a denial philosophy only makes the other side knowing there’s no chance to compromise.
for a third party observer, America’s philosophy is somewaht suicidal, when it is countering China is wishes its allies to pay the cost, or, its allies were unfortunately influenced, there’s no compensation. In long run, America wins the game but loses hearts.
pursuing defenite advantage than others will make a third party felt chilly: am I the next? How to avoid this fate? Can I unite all potential targets to avoid being taken as a target? Like I said, wins the game but loses the hearts.
Generally, present America is like the final days of Ming Dynasty of China, the empire treasury was almost empty but big heads possessed gold mountains, there’s outside threats (Manchu, Mongolians and Japanese), and ministers, lords, princes, all had differnt stances, they fought each other in the hall, the whole political machine is used as a weapon to attack the enemies in government, rather than enemies in field, the big heads controlled the information, they only report good news to the emperor, then emperor was blind and deaf, however, making final decision the right of the emperor, but a blind and deaf emperor only made wrong decisions. When farmers uprose to fight the unfair treatment, the big heads refused to fund the army, when Manchus and Japanese invaded, the corruptive army can’t fight. Finally, the emperor looked at the empty empire treasury, hang himself on a tree, when the emperor died, the empire collapsed, and Manchus conquered all China.
The history told us, for a big country, it collapses from inside, eyeing on an outsider is useless, or just put off its collapse. When an empire’s rotten from the root, “countering” an outside opponent only speeds up the bleeding.
Yes, me. It was a small company, a start up, still in a fairly early state. 22 people. The guy who hired me had great plans to get the company going, but the CEO didn’t like him. So fairly soon after I started the CEO fired my boss.
Now the reason I was hired was to replace an old guy who helped build the company but wanted to retire. Key role, materials engineering, for a company that wanted to be big in that field with new ideas. That guy taught me everything he knew, which was a lot.
But the CEO had certain plans, and because he fired my boss he decided I’d be next, so he let me go. But the guy that I was supposed to replace didn’t like what the CEO was doing, so when he heard I was fired, he decided to retire on the spot. Same day. We both walked out the door together.
So now there was a start up that wanted to become big in materials engineering, without any materials engineers, and nobody to teach any potential new employees what needed to be done.
I got lucky, I found a new job within a month. But the company that fired me went into administration shortly after, then a bigger company bought them, very cheaply, together with all their ideas, fired the CEO, merged all assets and basically deleted the company from existence.
WTF?
Who was the most unfortunate person in the history of mankind?
This Darrell Simmons of Morley, Alberta in Canada. Not only was he unlucky enough to have been born in Canada, but his luck never improved throughout his life.
He was forced to be chemically castrated after he was wrongfully accused of multiple sexual assaults in the 1980s. Once he was released from prison, he was given a pretty substantial sum of money.
Through bad investments though, he sadly lost everything. While working at a saw mill to try and get his life back together, he lost his hand in a freak accident.
One night while was out hunting with a friend, he was shot three times after being mistaken for a charging elk.
After recovering from the shooting, he was at home shoveling his driveway when he was struck by lightning in a snow storm. Darrell ultimately died that night, but it was determined that he survived the strike and actually froze to death.
More Men Choosing NOT To WORK And It’s Freaking Everyone Out
Fuck yeah. I have a friend. He worked construction doing Masonry well. One day he and his friend left work, and they got some beer on the way home. They went to my friend’s house, and they drank all the beer. My friend told his friend to watch my daughter. I’m going to go to the store and get some more beer his friend said all right, no problem. My friend left to go to the store, and when he came back, he found his friend inside of his 2-year-old daughter. He snapped. He beat the man unconscious and dragged him into the front yard. As he was dragging him to the front yard, he grabbed a can of gas and poured gas all over his friend and had to go back inside the house. Because he forgot his lighter when he came back out, he didn’t waste any time at all in turning his friend into Captain Crunch. He would have beaten the charge altogether if he hadn’t walked back inside the house , it would have been called a crime of passion,
but when he stopped and went back inside the house to get his lighter, it became premeditated murder because he thought about it first they tried him and found him guilty of premeditated murder and gave him a life sentence. I say we should have given him a medal.
“We have a world food system based on large multinational companies. It’s based on private profits and a very, very low measure of international transfers to help poor people (sometimes no transfers at all). It’s based on the extreme irresponsibility of powerful countries with regard to the environment and a radical denial of the rights of poor people, as we just heard.
We’ve just heard from the Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Many point a finger of blame at the DRC and other poor countries for their poverty.
Yet we don’t seem to remember, or want to remember, that starting around 1870, King Leopold of Belgium created a slave colony in the Congo that lasted for around 40 years; and then the government of Belgium ran the colony for another 50 years.
In 1961, after independence of the DRC, the CIA then assassinated the DRC’s first popular leader, Patrice Lumumba, and installed a US-backed dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, for roughly the next 30 years.
And in recent years, Glencore and other multinational companies suck out the DRC’s cobalt without paying a level of royalties and taxes.
We simply don’t reflect on the real history of the DRC and other poor countries struggling to escape from poverty. Instead, we point fingers at these countries and say, ‘What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you govern yourselves properly?’
Yes, we have a global food system, but we need a different system.
We cannot turn the global food system over to the private sector. We already did that about 100 years ago, and not only to the private sector, but to the private sector with the U.S. military behind it to defend these companies.
We just heard from the Minister of Honduras.
Let us recall that United Fruit Company essentially ran his country for a long time. United Fruit’s attorney was US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and his brother Allen Dulles was the head of the CIA.
On behalf of United Fruit Company, the two Dulles Brothers conspired to overthrow President Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala, next door to Honduras, in order to stop the land reforms that Árbenz was trying to implement.
So, yes, we have a global food system, but we need a different system.
That different system must be based on the principle of universal human dignity in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the principle of national sovereignty in the UN Charter, and the economic rights in the Universal Declaration and the International Covenant of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.
In the Universal Declaration, all governments agreed that social protection is a human right, not merely a ‘nice thing,’ or a pleasant thing, but a basic human right.
That was 73 years ago.”
Excerpt from the speech by American economist and academic, Jeffrey Sachs, at the U.N. Food Systems Pre-Summit, Rome, July 27, 2021.
She was never specific. Where she was going, what she was doing. Especially whenever I asked her a question, she wouldn’t give specifc answers.
“Where are you going after this?”
“Oh, just to the library.”
“What are you doing there?”
“Just some work.”
“What kind of work?”
“You know, school work. Some assignments and stuff.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
I never pressed. If she asked me anything I’d be upfront about it. I think I was pressing her because I had always suspected. Now I’d like to think deep down, I knew, but the truth is I didn’t. I didn’t want to.
“What are you doing right now?”
“Just laying in bed.”
“Alone?”
“Yes.”
“Did your roomates go out for the weekend?”
“No, they just went out.”
“Are you going home for the weekend?”
“Maybe.”
“Do you want me to come drop you off at the station?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Oh”
“Yeah.”
Heard from a friend of mine she was going with someone else. Apparently they met before we did. Luckily I was at the point where I really liked her but didn’t love her, so that made dropping her a bit easier. Still hurts, though.
When I worked at the electric company, after 14 years, the company decided to lay off 3,400 employees and hire contractors to replace us. I spent a lot of time hunting down lost demand meters, and had to jimmy some doors open with a coat hanger, go through dungeons that connected to other basements, till I found all 22 of these meters, I never missed a month of reading those meters, so I never had to give anyone else directions to find them all. After being laid off, I got a call from one of the supervisors asking if I could tell them how to find those meters, for free. I told them I couldn’t just tell them how to find them, there are tools involved and I never really mapped it out, I just kind of know how to go once I’m in that location. I would have to go there and show them what to do and how to go, or it wouldn’t make sense. The supervisor couldn’t be sure he could get the okay to allow me to physically go down there since I’m not covered on their insurance anymore. I suggested that he have faith in these new contractors to figure out how to find the meters on their own, after all, I did it. They only found 9 of the 22 meters in 5 years of looking, I was informed in 2002.
I just left a job that I loved, and there are a few things that only I know how to do, but so what, someone will have to take over doing my jobs, and the flavors may be different, but they will survive. After all they must have thought it through before making up their minds to make the changes they did. I didn’t advise anyone this time, as you said the advice goes unheeded anyway. I figured it out, so can they. Have a good day
You Won’t Believe What These Graphs Reveal About Women!
Keep learning throughout your life. Even if you stop learning life will teach you lesson till end.
If you feel to cry, cry for the whole day but don’t cry next day for the same thing. Next time if you feel to cry for that tell yourself that you have already cried that day for that.
Love someone lot but not at the cost of your self identity. Be yourself.
Don’t judge the people immediately.
Listen the other person very carefully. Try to listen those words which he/she couldn’t speak.
Learn the fastest ways to get out of your mental prison, depression and trauma. Time is not infinite.
Your words can cost you a lot, use them wisely.
Deliver only as much information as required to know to the other person and not as much as you know.
Plan your day at least before a day, everyday. Be consistent.
Find out your natural abilities and believe in that.
Increase your sources of income. Live a simple but meaningful life.
Keep your moral values high. Forgive the people as much as possible and move on.
Everyday try to get out of your comfort zone, feel uncomfortable to achieve something better.
Have patience, it is your biggest strength.
Be successful as much as that world know you without any introduction
A couple of years ago, three other members of my women educators group and I met up at the bank. Three of us were new officers who needed to sign on to our organization’s bank account.
Our treasurer had made an appointment as required, explaining ahead of time what was needed. When we arrived, the woman assigned to help us couldn’t find the forms we needed to sign, so she took our personal and organization information and told us we’d need to come back another time to do the signing once she’d completed the forms.
Returning was going to be difficult because our treasurer was just days away from going on a scuba diving trip with her husband and one of the new officers taught full-time and also worked for an after school program, but we checked our calendars and found a time that would work for the four of us once again.
When we returned another day, we told the person greeting us that we were there to meet with the woman who was to have completed the forms and have them ready for signing. The greeter said, “I’m the only female employee at this branch, other than the tellers,” and she wasn’t the woman we’d met with before.
Now we’re in Twilight Zone territory. We know the four of us didn’t imagine meeting with a woman at a desk, so one of us thought to ask, “Do you ever have temporary workers?” That was the “Ah ha!” moment for the greeter.
“We do have people from other branches of the bank come to help out occasionally. Maybe one of them was a woman,” she said. She then directed us to a man at a desk, we explained once again why we’re there, and he began the process of looking for the paperwork. He comes back to where we’re waiting, opens the folder with our organization’s name on it…
And finds blank forms.
Nothing was ready to be signed. “I’m sorry,” he told us, “but all your information will have to be entered into the computer, then they have to be printed for you to sign. Unfortunately, we close in 15 minutes and this is going to take about half an hour, so you’ll need to come back tomorrow.”
That was our final “You gotta be kidding me!” moment.
But there’s a good ending to the story. When we explained our time constraints and what we’d already been through with the other woman, he took pity on us and said, “I’m going to help you.”
It took about forty minutes in all, with him staying past closing time, but he got it done for us.
The first time was a young lady who was driving erratically. She had her flashers on, and it was raining. When I got to her window, I saw it was a teenager I knew, and she was sobbing saying her grandmother had had a heart attack and was in surgery. I told her to follow me to the hospital. I drove a LOT slower and safer than she was driving when I stopped her. When we got to the hospital, I went in with her to get the status of her grandmother (who wasn’t in surgery, but was stable and having a lot of tests run). Then, I accompanied her to the waiting room where I had a little chat with her about her driving. I was gentle, yet firm while I explained to her that I would rather her be visiting her grandmother at the hospital instead of being a patient along with her … or worse.
Not on the way to the hospital, but I pulled someone over who was driving erratically to get home because his blood sugar had dropped. He was a diabetic. I had a Snickers bar in my patrol car, so I gave it to him and sat on the side of the road with him until an ambulance showed up. By the time the ambulance arrived, his blood sugar had come up considerably. It was still “low,” but he wasn’t disoriented anymore. He had taken his regularly scheduled insulin, but hadn’t eaten. He thought he would make it home before his blood sugar “bottomed out.” He refused treatment, and I followed him home to make sure he got there okay.
I pulled a mom over for speeding, and she said she was taking her son to the ER because he had the flu. I got her to step to the back of the car where I scolded her for driving so fast (85MPH in a 50MPH zone). I explained “the flu” was NOT a medical emergency that was worth risking her life, as well as her son’s life, and the life of every other driver. I remember that stop so well because I thought she was so audacious for driving THAT MUCH over the posted speed limit while seeing me posted there. I didn’t cite her, but I did sternly warn her to slow down.
I responded to a residence to assist EMS on a cardiac arrest call. I cleared when the fire department showed up, as there were enough responders. I posted in my “usual spot” and saw the ambulance “running hot” to the hospital. I knew the patient. Just before the ambulance got out of sight, I stopped a car for speeding. The driver told me he was following his mom to the hospital … who was having a heart attack. Well, he got the heart attack part right, but his “mom” was one ugly bearded dude! (I told the patient the story when he got out of the hospital. We had a good laugh over it.) I cited the driver and suggested he bring his mother to court to help him contest the ticket.
He hated this one kid. He was umm, you know a kid with really short hair, wears chav jackets, always hanging with his mates, making jokes and never studies.
The teacher kept picking on him. He would give him looks and comments.
One day kid got really pissed off and said things like I don’t care. The teacher took him to his desk after the class.
He came back two hours later with a steaming hot red face. According to the kid, he had hit him and said some things. Kid called the police.
The police car came to our school. They had a chat with the kid and the teacher. Everyone tried to go out and see it but the other teachers didn’t allow us.
Later he made an apology to the kid and his parents. They didn’t accept it and wanted to make it formal at first, but when he told them his story they forgave him and dropped everything.
Turns out, his wife died from cancer when their daughters were just 6 and 8. Before they could do anything the hospital bills were too much and they were in debts. So he worked very hard day and night. He would teach during day and drive taxi at night. He had then later got hired for our school, a private school, and were able to pay all the debts. He even managed to send his daughter to one of the Ivy League schools.
However the little daughter had hard times and started causing trouble. She smoked, stole and hurt people. She would blame her dad for all of it. But he couldn’t get her straight because he felt too sorry for everything.
She also kept sleeping outside, then one day she never came back.
So the kid had reminded him of his daughter. Now this time he couldn’t let him drive off the course like how his daughter did. He tried to get him straight, in his own way.
He wasn’t fired. He kept teaching but he looked very depressed.
After a month or so he had quit the job and was never seen again.
GDP is a faulty measure of wealth and prosperity. So example if you get all your education free and healthcare is totally free of charge you are well and live till on average 2 years past the U.S. life expectancy if you earn half of Americans. You are just as will be just as well off. Or if Americans don’t earn twice as much as the Chinese you are certainly not as well off! Stop fooling yourself.
When I was young I thought Malaysian padi planters are not as well off till I realised they don’t need to buy rice for obvious reasons, and buy fish which they catch or chicken which they rear or indeed the vegetables which they plant. All they ever need is some cloths which they don’t need to look especially good since they hardly need to impress anyone. so whatever they earned they can saved it almost entirely.
In the same logic Americans were fooled to think they are rich due to this nonsense call GDP! In the U.S. GDP is overstated and wrongly represented. If 1% owned 80% of everything and 99% shares the 20%balance. These 99% are very poor! Right? What is worst is that your dollar in the U.S. buys you only a third of the same dollar in China!
For me Average Chinese are just as well off as the yanks by 2020 with less liabilities and more asset by 2010. Today they certainly live better than your average Joe! With better cars, bigger homes, better cloths and eat better than your 99%. Hence there is zero homelessness versus 1 million tent living Americans!
To me Americans are intentionally fooled into thinking they are rich to prevent Americans from rebelling against the forever wars and the 75 years decline in real living standards!
Early in my career, I had a boss with an unbelievable temper. Anytime I did anything wrong or if I just did something in a different way than he would have, he went ballistic. I’ll call him Don since that was his real name. One day Don stopped by the job site I managed and found that I had let the roofers work on five houses out of the order they had been assigned.
I didn’t ask why. Had he asked He would have found that the building inspector had inadvertently skipped the framing inspection inspection on that one house. We were not allowed to roof a house before the framing had passed inspection or we would have to tear off the new roof (destroying the shingles) and risk a good relationship with the inspector, something you always wanted and needed.
What did Don do? He screamed at me until I put my palm about an inch from his nose and and yelled back, “Don, would you shut up for just one minute!”
His response, after the shock of having someone yell back was, “You are fired! Fired! Fired.”
I was fed up with his temper after putting up with it for a month or so and was more than happy to pack up and leave, Construction was booming in our county so I knew I could find another job with little or no problem.
To my surprise, Don called my house at seven that evening and asked, “Are you coming to work tomorrow?”
“Fired employees don’t come to work the next day because THEY’RE FIRED.” Okay I admit I might have added some less than polite exclamations.
“Oh come on, you know I didn’t mean it. What’s wrong? Do you need more money?” He actually sounded contrite but did not offer an apology.
I knew he didn’t have anyone to cover my job and I also knew he was an administrator, not a builder, so I told him, “I’ll come back for three weeks so you can find my replacement IF you pay me double and do not show up on the site until I’m gone.”
I knew it would cost the company more money than my double pay to fall behind on the completion of the project so I wasn’t surprised when he agreed. Don was true to his word and didn’t show his face on site but did call me twice. Both times, I hung up as soon as I found who was calling.
I went on to another job after the promised three weeks and never looked back. Sometimes you just have to stand up to a tyrant boss and let the chips fall where they may.
Harry Potter And The Hogwarts Rave
What’s the worst thing that you did on a school computer?
It was actually in University, not the university I went to… a university… way back it was common for universities to simply have no security whatsoever in the UK.
Even in Hong Kong only PolyU and CUHK have barrier gates to the campus. This is unsurprising as they were the centre of the 2019 riots. You can go to many places on the HKU campus and Ling University campus I don’t know about HKUST without being challenged by security.
Anyway, it was at a university not going to say which one. It was one of my friends who was there and we used the university computer labs to play LAN games.
Anyway he was studying computer science. He’d done his coursework thing and found others had copied it. They’d copied it and claimed HE had copied them. He always documented his work though so was always cleared of plagiarism.
Anyway, he’d buy a load of cheap USB sticks and Floppy disks. He then wrote a program on it that looked like it was the coursework bit it linked to some program module or something… I don’t know how as I’m not very computer savvy.
This program went and searched for all the files on a persons computer and deleted them AND wrote over the HDD sector that it was stored on. It then displayed a message I hate you fucking cheating bastards it then wiped the USB stick and the floppy.
He then left it around various computer labs. We then went for a beer.
Catula
What made you lose interest in someone?
She got crazy and hung up on me mid-conversation.
When we’d been dating for less than a month.
She was angry I couldn’t do something on a Saturday with her friends. I was in grad school. And working full time.
It simply wasn’t an option. I had a group project we were doing.
More importantly though: I’m 31 years old. She’s 27. And she’s hanging up on me like a middle schooler.
I knew it then.
If she’s acting that crazy within a month. It would only get worse.
She texted me right after she hung up on me saying something to the effect of,
“I’m not going to include you in plans anymore. I’m making them without you.”
And I said, “Look – I’m a simple guy. I don’t know what is going on right now. But I can’t do all of this stuff. Make plans without me.”
And of course, she did a 180 and was apologizing via text and then sent me a video apologizing with her face all pressed up in the camera.
It was a strange scene. That Yo-Yo, up and down, drama stuff was already starting with her.
Against my better judgment, we hung out two more times. Which only further confirmed the crazy and my fading interest.
Younger people reading this: there’s a reason we write about red flags so much. Red flags are freaking real. They become your nightmare if you don’t see them.
Some videos are just unexplainable. Take a look at these
I once worked in a glass factory in Pennsylvania. The company was a huge mega-billion dollar operation, and I was working in one of the oldest and decrepit operations of it; the “hole in the wall” ancient facility in West Elizabeth, PA (in the heart of the “rust belt”) just South of Pittsburgh.
Ah. What a depressing place.
Closed factories, towns, shuttered homes. Dilapidated facilities, and all the rest. Rampant crime, poverty and drug abuse. Yuck.
Anyways, I worked in maintenance, and I was busy keeping the equipment working in that Hellish environment.
One day, I was told to fix a problem.
The factory had termites.
Yup. Hordes of termites were crawling out of the cracks in the cement floor, and they needed to be eliminated. They were over everything and starting to fall into the hot molten lead “river” bath that comprised the main assembly line.
Termites in cement?
Well, apparently the cement was poured over the old lumber / wood structure laid down two centuries ago. And termites ate up all the wood until there was nothing left. Just these long empty holes in the concrete. And that was that.
So I got an exterminator.
And while I was making plans to fill up the voids in the base structure, I was laid off… let go. And the factory continued as was.
And that is my story about the termites that attacked the glass factory in Pennsylvania.
Termites.
Swarming out of the cement floor.
Attacking the mill workers.
Ah, strange things occur when civilizations start to decay and break down.
Future biotechnology could be used to trick a prisoner’s mind into thinking they have served a 1,000-year sentence—in just 8 hours.
This type of technology could potentially change the way punishments are given to criminals.
Dr. Rebecca Roache, a researcher, says that drugs could be used to manipulate the brain into thinking you’re serving a longer sentence than you actually are.
“There are a number of psychoactive drugs that distort people’s sense of time, so you could imagine developing a pill or a liquid that made someone feel like they were serving a 1,000-year sentence.”
A different way of achieving this end goal—putting people in prison for a short amount of time but making them think it’s longer—would be to speed up the rate that the mind works at.
In other words, ‘uploading’ someone’s mind to a computer and ‘speeding up’ the rate at which it was thinking, could make someone feel like they’ve lived for a thousand years.
I think this end result seems scary to say the least.
Sure there are some pros you could argue for:
Criminals could have longer sentences.
Jails wouldn’t have to pay as much money to take care of prisoners for long periods of time.
It could potentially be more efficient.
However, there are also other things to think about.
Is it humane to make someone live out hundreds of years—only in their minds?
How would this affect their mental health?
Are their memories going to be the same?
What if someone was wrongfully jailed and we punished them for ‘1000 years’?
Imagine this:
A criminal, wrongfully accused of a horrendous crime, gets a jail sentence of 500 years.
Their mind is sped up in order to make them feel as if they’ve experienced 500 years when in reality, it was only a couple of hours.
Everyone around them is normal.
Their family doesn’t miss them.
However, they, on the other hand, have been without anyone for seemingly hundreds of years.
This would probably ruin them forever, completely changing their lives and the way they think.
They’d be contemplating the unfairness of their sentence for YEARS.
I think that the nature of this technology is quite inhumane and shouldn’t be developed or used in the future.
Too many risks.
Baked Eggs on Toast (Jaja na Grzankach – Polish)
Yield: 3 to 6 servings
Ingredients
6 slices white bread
Butter
3 tablespoons freshly-grated Parmesan cheese
1 tablespoon chopped fresh chives
6 eggs
Salt and freshly-ground pepper, to taste
Instructions
Toast the bread and butter it on both sides. Place on a baking sheet and, using the tips of your fingers, make a small depression in each piece of toast. Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese and chives. Carefully drop an egg onto each piece of toast and season with salt and pepper.
Bake in a preheated 400 degrees F oven for 5 to 10 minutes, until the eggs reach the desired degree of doneness.
They like to play victim all the time. Trust me when I say they will go to every extent to show that they are a victim.
They lie even when it is not necessary. They look for what is beneficial to them.
They will try to make you feel guilty for things you’re not actually guilty for.
They never self-reflect. If you do something, it is wrong for them. But if they do the same thing, it is right. Whatever they do, it is always right. If you tell them that it’s not, then they will do everything in their power to make it seem like they are right.
They will easily give you a silent treatment. Their aim is to make it seem like they do not need you and make you feel like you’re guilty.
They will always dismiss your problems and say they have it worse.
Even if you give them the world, if one day things don’t work out their way, they will attack you. They do not care about what you’ve done for them, they only care about having things work their way.
Initially they will make it seem like they are opening themselves up, but they only do that so that you feel comfortable and put yourself out there like an open book. Once you do that, you realize that you barely know anything about them.
They are extremely smart in each step they take. This isn’t noticeable at first. But once you spot them, it becomes a lot easier to see that every step is calculated. Most of the times, their easiest form of manipulation is sympathy seeking. For example: If they’re sick, they will let everyone know. Not for anything, but sympathy.
How to build an AI MODEL that makes $11,000 per month
One time in my mid-twenties, my GF at the time and I were driving halfway across the country (from Florida to western Oklahoma) to visit some good friends from our High School days.
About midway through Texas, it was getting late, and I was getting a little tired. This was back before GPS, so we were using plain old paper maps. As we were going down a smaller, less-busy road, I noticed ed that my turn was coing. I started to go for the turn, but I realized at the last second that I was too late to make the turn safely. So I aborted the turn and went back to driving down the road, looking for a place to turn around.
As I swerved, 4 sets of patrol car lights burst into action in my rear-view mirror. It seems that a long haired dude driving the back roads of Texas with Florida plates is suspicious. We attracted quite the array of attention—Texas Ranger, County Sherriff, Local PD, AND Highway patrol! They had been tailing us for about 5 miles.
So, They ask us to step out of the car, separate us to make sure we are telling the same story, and ask to search my vehicle. I said go ahead. They asked if I had any weapons, and I replied “No, sirs” As they began to conduct the search, I remembered that I had a pocket knife on the dashboard…fearing that an un-mentioned blade might be considered bad, I blurted out—”Wait, officer..I forgot there IS a weapon!” At that moment, 8 sets of hands went to pistol grips in the “ready to draw” position. I clarified “There’s a pocket knife on the dashboard…I forgot about that.” The local PD officer looked at the dainty knife (IT was only about a 4 inch blade) and said “Shit, son..that ain’t a weapon. It’s a tool.”
After a few minutes, the party ended, and the various LEOs bid us a good night and told us a shortcut to bet back to my original target road.
It’s not a weapon…it’s a tool. I still giggle about that to this day, almost 30 years later.
A guy with us, who was particularly overweight, who constantly complained about being overweight, said he wasn’t hungry—and then when it came time to eat, dove into the food like he hadn’t eaten in 3 weeks.
I’ve seen a few people like that over the years—eating as if they were on the brink of starvation.
Once, I was at a local zoo. I was able to hold a bear cub and feed it a bottle of milk. What I didn’t expect, this small bear cub was fed 3 bottles by other tourists before it was my turn.
I was annoyed —I thought I’d get to feed a hungry bear.
And my annoyance was misplaced. Despite having 3 bottles of milk— the bear tore into this milk like it hadn’t eaten in forever. That bear instinct to store up calories starts early. I’ve never seen a creature clawing at the bottle, moaning, eager to consume every last drop of milk out of this thing as if it was a race.
To the question: this ties into the statistic that people who eat too quickly tend to overeat and be overweight.
If you slow down your eating—it will give your brain time to catch up and sense when you are actually full, rather than gorging yourself and waiting up with a gut. (Slow Down, You Eat Too Fast. Dr. Kathleen Zelman)
To be fair—I also eat too quickly, I’d be obese if I didn’t work out constantly.
Some of us are just born with a natural hunger gene, are emotional eaters, or we have that instinct in us to prepare for hibernation.
I am not 60, but I am retired. I served 25 years in the Army both Officer and Enlisted. I retired in 2009, and to be honest leaving the Army wasn’t the hard part. Settling back into the Civilian World was the hard part. Matched to the chief reason I retired at age 42.
That’s my youngest our Lil Mitts, and first day of college back in August 2023. I let go of the US Army and jumped feet first into being the primary parent for a Special Needs Child. All while engaged in being a grandparent.
All while self-managing my investment real estate portfolio which includes all my own maintenance and repair work. Above is before, below is after.
Then we have I also love maintaining my own cars.
Life is about continuing to the end always reinventing yourself till the end. Do I still do PT? Yes I do. Do I miss being shot at? Hell no!
Retirement is merely the rest of your days free of obligation to an Employer. That doesn’t equate stop living. The secret to enjoying it is find other things to enjoy.
Two of my siblings were upset that I inherited one of my father’s farms. They contested everything in court — and soundly lost. That was on a Monday morning. Wednesday morning I left the farm to drive home, 680 miles. I was 2/3 of the way home when I got a call that my farmhouse was on fire. Police initially accused me of setting the fire but that collapsed when I proved I was 500 miles away when the arson took place. There was no insurance coverage so I just lost a house I figured was worth less than $40k. I was screwed. Then I wasn’t screwed. Come tax time I asked my accountant how the loss of the house would get figured in. The account took values from similar 1840s farmhouses that had been sold and came up with a paper loss of more than 10 times what I thought the house was worth. I won’t pay taxes for a LONG time. The arsonist that I thought hurt me actually made me richer.
I’m pretty sure the arsonist was either one of my siblings, or someone they hired. I’m absolutely sure they were doubly pissed when the word got back to them that they made me richer!
When I was living with a girlfriend, her mother came from another city, to visit us for 9 days. But we still had to work 3 days of that week. OMG. The chaos. She could not sit still, she cleaned everything. She sorted our fridge, rearranged every cupboard. She put our toaster that we used everyday behind the slow cooker, that we used once a month. It took us a month to find the cork screw.
The drinking glasses were in the cupboard furthest from the sink, but closest to the fridge. We drank tap water, she put a pitcher of water in the fridge for us.
She rearranged our furniture so that it suited her better.
Some things, like washing our windows were appreciated, but we weren’t slobs, and she drove us up the wall with her constant movements. She constantly told us better ways to do things, and that the cars we drove, were not the best vehicles for us, that we needed to search for better jobs.
We had to drive her back to her city, and on the way, we told her that we loved her, but she wouldn’t be able to stay with us for more than a weekend, if she ever did that again.
She said that all she wanted was to help us, which made her feel loved and needed.
We said that advice should only be given when asked for, or if once or twice a year, she saw something that we should really know about.
She was heartbroken, she was upset that we didn’t appreciate all the work that she had done to make our lives better.
My girlfriend asked her, how much she appreciated her (girlfriends) grandmother coming and rearranging the house, and telling her what she was doing wrong.
The MIL said that was different because Granny was out of date and didn’t know how things should be done.
Then she abruptly shut up. Unfortunately my girlfriend and I broke up before her next visit, but I suspect that we cured her, of her habit.
Both of my parents were functional alcoholics. My father worked 50ish hours in a kitchen for decades while ma was general manager of a restaurant for over a decade. They did this while drinking a 30 pack of beer and eventually adding a 1.75 bottle of rum that didn’t last more than 2 nights. They spent more then 3 grand a month on alcohol and cigarettes on an income of about 50–60k (I’m not 100% sure but these were estimates my papa figured out since he knew their general income and expenses and also the price of alcohol and cigarettes back then).
My father was a drunk for decades until being arrested and sent to prison for abuse and assault. He later died of liver failure almost 20 years later. Ma never got a traffic ticket, DUI, or any reprimand at work even though she was always hungover and or still drunk while working. She managed to be functional for years and eventually severely limit her alcohol intake after my father was arrested. That is until the night she was babysitting my twins so I could pick up a shift. I came home after work to her passed out drunk on the couch and my infant son dead in the tub. She couldn’t wait until after his bath to start or continue drinking, and my son paid for it. After 4 years in prison she stayed sober and maintained her sobriety for about a decade before she died. That was her way of apologizing for Patrick’s death and making amends, though it will never undo her actions.
That’s what is wrong with being a functional addict. You can be fine for decades but it’s almost guaranteed that they won’t stop until they’re dead or do something that will force them to stop.
Yes. My wife and I wanted to try out a new place in town that had just opened up. We were in our early 50s at the time.
We asked if we could sit in the bar area that looked fun. The hostess said they had one table for us.. and escorted us to an area in the back corner of the place which was populated with elderly people and families with small children. It was evident they wanted the young happening crowd up front.
We weren’t happy but still wanted to give the place a try so we sat down and waited.. and waited. No wait staff ever approached our table! We tried to flag down a waitress and she ignored us. At the 20 minute mark we got up and left. Nobody noticed!
We drove down the road and tried another place. We were cheerfully seated at the bar. Service was excellent. 12 years later we still go there once a week. Just think about the tens of thousands the first restaurant has lost!
I can answer as to the small-town American shopping experience of the late 1980s-early 1990s.
There’s a great youtube series called “Dead Malls,” where a guy walks around giant indoor malls that are closed or barely hanging on.
When I was a kid, those malls were very much alive, and that’s where we did all of our non-grocery shopping. They had big anchor department stores at the ends of every major wing, plants and fountains in the walkways, plenty of seating areas, a food court, an arcade, and dozens of other shops. Families would go there as a group, then split up and go their separate ways to do their shopping. Boys like me usually ended up at the arcade. Men like my father usually ended up getting a drink and sitting in one of the sitting areas to “people watch.”
They all had a small bookstore, too.
And a small toy store.
And a music store where you could listen to music before buying it on cassette or, if you were rich, CD.
And one or two hair salons. Sometimes one specifically for children.
The better malls also had movie theaters in them.
And dine-in restaurants separate from the cafeteria-like food court.
And mall walkers… old people who did laps around the inside of the mall as exercise.
And, around Christmas, they’d have a Santa in the middle of the mall, for picture-taking purposes.
My mother was a manager of a shoe store in the local mall in my hometown for a while there when I was a kid. Of about 40 stores in that mall, 5 of them were shoe stores.
Parents would often drop their pre-teens off at the mall to “hang out” with their friends for a while. You couldn’t go to the mall in the evening without running into someone you knew from school.
There are a few malls like this that still do good business in the Chicago area. I go to one called Northbrook Court about twice per year, mostly because that’s where the Lego store is. But every time I go there, it gets a little more depressing, as every time there are fewer and fewer other people there.
Outdoor malls seem to be doing better these days, around here at least. The one near me recently became pet-friendly, so people can walk their dogs there, too, and hopefully spend some money.
Wal-Mart and Target were the beginning of the end of the mall in my hometown. Amazon was the final nail in the coffin.
Now that small hometown mall, like many others, has been converted to other uses. They have just a few big stores in them, like hobby or sporting goods stores, and their entrances are to the parking lot, not to the interior of the mall. Basically, they’ve been converted into strip malls.
Sadly, I have a lot of experience in this matter. But, it is not what you think.
There are many companies that operate inside of China, and it is so easy and cheap to set up if you are Chinese. So, Point 1, if you see a company inside of China, run by Chinese, it is probably a real company.
Point 2. There are many companies that operate inside of China that are not Chinese. These are known as WOFE’s. These are “Wholly owned foreign enterprises”. The entire ownership is by foreigners, and no Chinese are involved except as workers on a payroll. Again, these are not too expensive or difficult to set up. But they are severely monitored, and they do require a Chinese presence. (In other words, you cannot have a WOFE located inside of Australia.)
Point 3. Most of the already established major foreign corporations that operate within China are legacy companies. They were established before the WOFE program came into being, and are joint-ventures of one form or the other.
Point 4. There are many non-Chinese that pretend to be Chinese companies to swindle you. Many operate in the UK, Africa, and India. They pretend to be a Chinese company, and try numerous methods to extract information or monies from you. The Chinese consulates have access to a very lengthy list of these operations, and individuals and are on Interpol.
So, how do you know if you are dealing with a real company or something else?
There are numerous things you can do and watch out for.
[1] No Passport scan. Do not provide a scan of your passport for any reason to a stranger on the internet. One of the on-going scams is for the “company” to send you a scan pretending to be this person or that person. Do not send yours in response, and certainly do not get involved in any contracts requiring one.
[2] Face to face. Most scams involve e-mail. If you suggest a zoom meeting or some other video conference, and they call you instead, it’s a “red flag”, it’s that you need to see who you are dealing with. And you need to record the interaction. The chances are that the image on the passport will not match the voice at the end of the phone or the video on the screen. For instance, a UK passport showing a white male, and the voice on the phone has a very deep Indian accent with Delhi inflections.
[3] Factory / Office Visit. You need to meet the people in their offices or factory. While you are there, you must perform a professional audit. You not be taken back by a shiny tall office building, or a ratty back-woods hovel. You have to see the facilities and realize that they are real.
And yeah, you can employ investigators, and sleuth the internet. But really [1] be cautious and keep your personal information safe. Then, the best thing to do is [2] talk with people in person one-on-one using video conferencing, then, [3] set up a factory visit.
This last point requires that the factory apply for a Chinese legal document with company stamp / chop for the invitation. This is a very important step. You will use the invitation to obtain your visa to enter China. This step is very important, as it gets the Chinese police involved in-case anything goes wrong. As well, as you will not get a visa if the document is forged.
Summary
There are many, many companies inside of China, and all of legitimate, but the problem really is two-fold…
Is this a real Chinese company, or some scam-artist out of the UK or India trying to steal from me?
And if it is real, will they be able to meet my expectations.
I hope that this answer is helpful to you, and helps you accomplish your objectives.
x-86’s fate is chained to Microsoft’s Windows, although ARM is making inroads.
Loongson or Longxin makes RISC-based CPUs, with independent IP that’s not licensed from third parties.
This excludes Longxin from the Windows eco-system. It runs primarily on Linux, which is open-source.
Which is fine, because the first world hasn’t developed great Chinese software options that are competitive with mainland ones.
To add context, there are no Chinese IME (Input Method Editor) from the west that come close to being usable. Yes, Microsoft Pinyin/Swiftkeys/Gboard for Chinese input is lipstick on pigs next to mainland options.
China will grow its own eco-system, adapting Linux as the native OS. Eventually, Longxin will have access to advanced nodes, and offer competitive chips at far lower prices across the performance spectrum. This will drive the adoption of Longxin-powered laptops/desktops, which is already turning up in offices today.
This will reduce the market share of Windows/Mac, but they will still enjoy eco-system protection, unless geopolitics gets in the way.
Check back in another 5 years, especially in the content creator realm. AI and fusion computing will drive huge changes.
Typically within the Chinese Communist Party, a Leader who gives such a commitment must stand by it
A Leader who says in TEN YEARS, something will happen and if he is unable to deliver – he is relegated to handling food deliveries and preparing inventory for the rest of his life
In India, it’s forgotten in 10 seconds
That’s the difference between the Two Countries
The Reason China is a Great Power, that terrifies the socks out of the West is because in China, The People in Power don’t talk when they don’t mean it
In 2011, a Man made a speech that in a decade China would achieve Aerospace Independence. This was after the Wolf Act
He was Xi Jingping
He delivered his promise
By 2021, China was using BEIDOU for their Global Navigation entirely and their Aerospace Industry was Indigenous and the Chinese had landed on the Moon and Mars and plenty more
Ren Zhengfei made a commitment for solving his Chip crisis in ten years, in 2018
In five years, he launched a phone with entirely Indigenous Chips and Modems and other unique aspects
Five years!!!!!
Now I don’t want to embarrass Rajiv Chandrashekhar here
We have seen enough DRDO miracle drugs and enough Ventilators and Test Kits and enough Scientific marvels talked about with zero achievement
The Man is a fool and is embarrassing the country in front of anyone who knows the Semiconductor Business
The fact that he talks of dominating an Industry that China with twenty four years and $ 1 Trillion has just achieved maybe 80% parity with the West , in a decade
With what exactly?
Ten years is barely a single generation
That’s 2034
That means the Average Generation of Workforce to be a Median 31 years would have to be born in 2003
This means graduates of 2020 -2022
The Covid Batches!!!!!!!
Most of them CSE graduates
Most of them Graduates of Tier 3 Colleges with very little actual education
Even if we start today after a full syllabus, that still means Students who are 12 and that means Students born in 2013 at the earliest
This means at the Median Age for Workforce of 31, that’s 2044
Thats MINIMUM
So with all the luck in the world, with the 2013 generation having an median IQ North of 125–130 and with every reform possible – it would take 20 years to develop a workforce equivalent to what the Chinese have today
Thats so much Optimism that the chance of Virat Kohli picking up Eight wickets in an innings is higher
And RC talks of 10 years
Is he stupid?
Is he delusional?
Or is he just being INDIAN? Talking without any implications
When persuading somebody, use their name in the middle of the request, especially if they’re not very close to you. This is an amazing trick. It works because people feel the need to be acknowledged. Once they are, they will be way more unlikely to be disagreeable with you.
Touching the shoulder. That’s the same reasoning as before, but more bold. Also, more effective if it works. It’s all about proximity and acknowledgment.
When you want to convince somebody else, if you nod your head some times while talking, that person will be more likely to accept what you’re saying as true.
When you’re saying something that is very serious, look straight into their eyes and don’t look away (but blink, the idea is not to look like a psychopath).
Complement somebody about how impressive is what they are doing for you. This is the oldest trick in the world, except if you ask a question. People love to talk about themselves. Asking about how they learned to do that keeps them bragging while you get your stuff done 🙂
This is one of my favorites. When Obama was debating Mitt Romney, there’s this moment when Romney brings up Obama’s pension. While he’s doing this, Obama ignores him, smiles and forces Romney to repeat the question several times. This is an amazing domination technique – it made Romney seem like he was begging for attention.
Another one about dominance, if you start talking to somebody, get them engaged and then in the middle ask for his or her name again, as if you forgot. It puts people very uncomfortable around you, but keep in mind this might be not so cool if you don’t do it naturally.
This one is to screw someone else in an argument. When somebody finishes talking, don’t answer. They are probably going to keep talking to fill the silence, which will make them look like they are not in control of the conversion.
My dad went against what everyone else around him suggested, thought, and told him directly to do. He followed his gut.
My dad was an elder in our congregation. A woman and her husband went to him along with other elders for marital counseling.
After the couple met with the elders a few times, Dad felt like the woman and her two sons were in danger from her abusive husband. The other elders did not, they advised her to try harder and work things out.
When he knew the husband was gone, my dad showed up at the woman’s house, surprising her. He told her to hurry, get her sons, pack some things quickly and to remain calm.
She said she instinctively knew what he was doing, he was saving her and her boys. With no questions, she followed his directions. Within 20 minutes they were walking out the door together.
Dad took her and her boys to a shelter. He gave her money. He told her he felt she she wasn’t safe with her husband, and he felt the boys were in danger too.
After the boys were away from their dad they felt safe enough to tell their mom their horrible secret. Their father had been abusing them. Police were notified and after an arrest and trial, the father was convicted and sentenced to prison.
My father never told a soul what he did. I only found out about what my dad did years later. I ran into the woman who my dad helped. She became a second mother to me and her sons were, and still are, like brothers. She told me what my dad had done and that it saved her life. It saved her two boys too. My dad was the only one in the world who believed her. The one and only person that decided to do something. She said he was her hero.
My dad died when I was 15. At a very broken 18 was when I heard her story. I guess it was part of my dad’s story too. This new insight into my father brought me great comfort. I always struggled with whether dad would be proud of me or not. After hearing that, I knew and still know in my heart no matter what, dad would’ve heard me and listened to me. He would’ve believed me and I know he would be proud of me.
I was in Tennessee schools from grade 6–11… I never actually graduated.
I had reached the conclusion that Tennessee schools (Nashville specifically) were, at best, sub-par long before this incident, but this was the moment that I realized that I could not survive another year dealing with the total idiocy.
I was at Glencliff HS in 1985. I was in my English class and was the only white student AND the only male student. The “teacher” was a black woman that was only 5 years older than me and chose to teach the class in “Ebonics”. Yes, that was a thing.
Her choice to teach in Ebonics made the class hard for me to deal with, since I couldn’t understand 90% of what she was saying. She also chose to totally ignore me, even going so far as to refuse to properly grade my classwork, just giving me a default C grade regardless of the quality of my work.
The final straw, the absolute last thing I could tolerate, was when one of the girls in the class randomly asked “Teach, what be’s the longest word in the English langidge?”
Now, there is debate on which word can be considered the “longest”, depending on if you are looking for the longest word PERIOD or the longest word that could be commonly known. For the latter it is Antidisestablishmentarianism.
That is the word the teacher chose to write on the board…. misspelled.
That broke me. I stood up, walked to the board, erased what she wrote and wrote it correctly. I then told her that she was a “goddamned idiot that shouldn’t be teaching earthworms to dig through dirt” and walked out. I had intended to just go to the library and await the punishment I was sure would follow, but when I reached the front doors of the school I walked out, and kept walking until I got home. I never went back. I got my GED and a college degree instead.
Chicken Kiev
The chicken is pounded thin, rolled with a filling of seasoned butter, breaded and then either deep-fried or baked.
Yield: 8 servings
Ingredients
4 large whole chicken breasts, split, skinned, de-boned
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 clove garlic, crushed
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
1 teaspoon thyme or marjoram
All-purpose flour
2 eggs, beaten
1 cup fine bread crumbs
Salt
Instructions
Pound breasts thin between plastic bags, keeping the smooth side of breast down.
Mix next 4 ingredients. Shape into 8 elongated oval pieces and freeze.
Wrap chicken completely around butter and dip each chicken piece into flour.
Next dip into eggs and finally coat with bread crumbs.
Fry in hot oil (375 degrees F) for 10 to 12 minutes or bake at 350 degrees F for 45 minutes.
Drain on paper towels. Salt after cooking. Chicken will keep in a 200 degrees F oven if placed, uncovered, on a metal tray.
They victimize themselves — whenever they fail to perform they will become the victim. “I can’t repay your favor. Don’t you know how severe my life situation is?”
They will villainize you — along with becoming a victim they will make you the villain. “How inhuman are you to put a burden on me during this time?”
They are pathological liars — they will lie about small stuff like meeting a celebrity or false accomplishments. And will continue to lie on it even when they are exposed.
They pretend to be good — they will boast about their big-heart with a smile while their actions are always opposite. They appear helpful without ever helping anyone.
They will take your credit — when you are being praised for your work, they shift that praise onto themselves.“Oh, yes I gave him this brilliant idea”
They will label you inferior — they will label themselves superior and you, inferior. They will make you feel debted that a high-quality person is spending time with someone like you.
They gaslight you — when you call out on their manipulative behavior, they will label you emotionally unstable. They will make you doubt your sanity.
They undermine your problems — when you list them your problems and ask for support, they inflate and list their problems. “I know it’s hard without money. I was turned down my raise recently”
They will step-over you — in order to save their social image, they will destroy yours. When they are made fun of, they will shift social attention by making fun of you.
When I was living in Erie, I went shopping with my roommates. We went grocery shopping, which was something we did about once a month.
One of my ‘mates was this big burly man named Mark. He was a silly guy. Drank Pepsi cola like no one else alive. Perhaps twelve bottles a day. It was his way of coping as he distanced himself away from his drug abusing past.
A coping mechanism. I get it.
Well, as I checked out and had the groceries, Mark was no-where to be found.
We looked and looked, until he finally came out one hour later.
He strolled up to the car.
We asked “where the fuck were you?”
And he said “I don’t want to talk about it”.
But, later on he did.
It turned out that he was drinking a Pepsi in the store, and instead of taking the empty bottle to the checkout counter, he placed it on a shelf. And it was caught on the CC television video system, and the store detective nabbed him.
As he was on parole, this could have gone very badly for him. But… life is strange. It turned out that the store detective was a classmate of his, and after the mandatory beat-down, they warmed up and kicked-back and shared memories and stories.
Life is sometimes like that.
I am sure that Mark has since thought long and hard about this kind of “store grazing” behavior. I like to think that he is a better person for it. Ah I hope.
As I review my life, I am constantly amazed at how many times coincidences seem to intertwine the threads of our lives together.
Not quite a garage sale. A good friend, “ George” was a coin collecter, who noticed a small ad in the local News paper. “ selling late husbands coin collection – make an offer.” With nothing else to do that day he called and went to see the lady. He started to poke through and told her he need a bit of time, but he found 3 coins he wanted, for himself. He said to the lady I will buy these three right now, on the condition that if anyone else calls you tell them the “ entire collection is sold “ she said but you are only buying 3 coins what about the rest, what do I do. He said “ I will sell them for you, please give me a chance” She reluctlently agreed. He paid $300 cash each for the coins he picked out. He saw that the lady was not to well off and had lost her husband. He sat down and selected 10 coins, wrote down what they were and description, and said he would sell them for her. He was in touch with her every day, and about 10 days later, he went to see her and told her he was able to get a decent price for 3 of the coins he left with. he handed her $8000.00. and confirmed he would sell all of the coins that she had. She said as she was going through her late husbands things she had found other coins. She really had no interest in the coins and said they had taken up so much of her husbands time away from her. George told her that her husband loved her more then she knew. In about one year, he had sold off the entire collection of coins for just over $450,000.00 A few of the gold coins he told her to keep for herself.
My wife loves a deal. If they offered a free toaster with an Aston Martin, I might be driving my dream car.
So we were on vacation in Athens and she pulled off a haggling master stroke – a bag, a dress, and a speedo (hey, it was Europe) and got them to knock a few hundred euro off the price. All she said was, “is this the best price you can do?”
And this was at Dolce & Gabbana!
So, while on a business trip in Venice, I decided to pick two things up for my wife:
A dress and a deal.
At Prada!
I found the perfect dress. Something she definitely wouldn’t buy herself, but would look great on her. It was pricey, but I had my ace in my sleeve. My all-purpose Euro retail haggling pass.
The saleswoman approached me. I explained that I wanted the dress. She was pleased with my selection.
And then I did it.
I whipped out my haggling secret weapon, with Blue Steel swagger, and an expectant attitude.
“Is this the best price you can do?”
She paused and just stared at me.
I’m thinking, haha… didn’t see that one coming did you?
She keeps staring. She wrinkles her brow, like she’s computing the speech in her head.
Now I’m getting worried.
Then, she has a moment of clarity.
“Oh, are you trying to negotiate?”
She’s says it like I’m some 9 year old kid who just asked his 24 year old babysitter to be his girlfriend.
Me: (trying to stay cool) “Well… um, yeah…. You know. If there is any room for…..”
Her: (interrupting but sincere) “We don’t negotiate at Prada.”
Ordered 4 new bras from an online shop, ended up receiving 32 new bras, none of which were the color I had ordered.
The receipt in the box was tallied for 8 bras with a note that they’d been running a promo the day I ordered that they were buy 1 get 1 free. I don’t even want to fathom how 8 turned into 32, but when I called the company to get a return label the gal informed me that the bra sale had actually been buy 1 get 2 free, which should have only been 12 bras, not 32, and who the heck gives away 2 forty dollar bras?
Got transferred to a different representative and was informed that the bras I was trying to return where non-returnable since they’d actually been discontinued and were now “on clearance” neither of them had addressed the issue that the bras I received were the wrong color (right size at least)
I was transferred yet again (gotta love “that’s not my job” employment opportunities) where I was quickly informed that they would send out the bras in the right color.
Fast forward a few days and I received 12 of the right size, right color bras. They had honored the buy 1 get 2 free sale apparently. I also received 8 additional bras in colors I hadn’t even known were available in my size as a “consolation prize” for my troubles.
So, 52 bras for the price of 4 at forty dollars each. I haven’t had to special order bras in years…
I’ve worked in software engineering for 20 years. I come from a no-name college in India, and my grades weren’t stellar. SO, getting into top tier companies was hard for me. Over 20 years, I’ve worked my way up, and I’m in Amazon now. On the way, I have worked in all kinds of companies: startups, mid sized companies, large multi nationals; and in all kinds of industries: consumer goods, healthcare, finance, education
First of all, Companies are tiered in terms of the skill levels of their engineers. They pretend not to be. Everyone claims that they hire the smartest engineers. WHat they mean is that they hire the smartest engineers that they can get. There is a definite differrence in Engineers working in FAANG companies (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google), I’ve seen all kinds of engineers
Here’s the kicker. The biggest difference isn’t in the quality of the code that they write. FAANG engineers, on the whole, write as buggy code as engineers in decent companies.
The biggest differentiator is Communication. When I was in mid-tier companies, I was constantly finding myself explaining and re-explaining things in great detail. In fact, I would say that at most companies at mid-tier level, your success as an engineer depends on being able to drive people in the right direction by communicating to them.
There are 3 kind of people in tech. There are a) arguers:- people who will fight every point of view that isn’t their own, b) receivers: people who will try their best to understand what you are saying c) analyzers: people who start thinking critically while you are talking to them. Arguers are toxic. Receivers are good but slow. Analyzers are good and fast. In mid tier companies, you are more likely to find Arguers and Receivers, whereas in top-tier companies, you are more likely to find Receivers and Analyzers.
To be a successful tech company, you need to get in as many Analyzers as you can. Because these are the people who generate ideas. These are the people you give 2 and 2 and they figure out how to make 8. Not only that, with ANalyzers, you have to spend less time getting the team on the same page. Less miscommunication = Less rework = shorter turnaround = lower time to market = win.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying communication is bad. Communication is good. You need to make sure everyone understands what needs to be done. Communication is essential. All I’m saying is that in top tier companies, communication is lot more efficient. It’s like getting onto a highway. You are just going faster.
Not me, but my ex-wife, and I didn’t witness it. She told me about it several years after the fact.
My ex and I are both blind. As in without sight. One of the things you have to understand about blind people is probably something obvious. To wit, we don’t drive. We can’t. Has never happened and ain’t gunna ever happen; no, not ever. Another thing you have to understand about blind people is that sometimes sighted people will ask the stupidest questions or do the dumbest things. Usually this happens when we’re just walking along, minding our own business. One day this happened to her.
I can’t remember what she was doing at the time, but she was walking along, doing whatever errand she had to do, when this group of women happened to come upon her. One of them was obviously drunk.
“So,” said the drunk woman, “you’re blind, right?”
“Yes,” she said.
“So, um, like, how do you drive?”
My ex, who walks with a cane because she’s obviously blind, said:
“Well, I have two canes. When I drive, I keep one cane out the right window, and another out my left window. That way when I bump into something, I know when and how to turn.”
“Really?” said this other woman. “That’s amazing!” And she went on and on for some time about what an amazing feat this was,, while the other people she was with were laughing and calling her an idiot, which she so obviously was.
Probably convincing others that this is a good look. It isn’t — your lips look like a baboon’s anus swelling to indicate it’s ready for mating. I’ve never in my whole life met a single person, male or female, who appreciates this aesthetic. And yet I keep seeing it, with increasing frequency.
This weird bimbo-style… the heavy makeup… the facial fillers… and those God-awful inflated lips. Shudder. It’s horrific. So painful on the eyes that it makes one question the existence of the God who supposedly made our species in His image. The fake lashes don’t help, either… I mean why bother changing yourself in a way that isn’t genuine? I get going to the gym, working out or getting a tan, all those yield tangible results. But why alter yourself in ways that a single shower or missed injection could erase?
The weirdest thing people have ever done is invent this made-of-plastic bimbo aesthetic and promote it on social media as something to aspire to… it’s giving women in their twenties the appearance of elderly Hollywood stars in denial of their age. Turns the “girl next door” into whatever-the-hell-happened-to-Madonna. It’s an absolute travesty.
Originally Answered: Who was the most ignorant person you have ever met in America?
This happened many years ago, but it is what came to mind when I read this question…
I was teaching class, and we were discussing the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Students were discussing their various thoughts on the situation.
One student stated, very loudly, “You know what really bothers me? All those people who are shouting and holding up signs…why aren’t they speaking English?”
I explained that it is unreasonable to expect people in a foreign country to protest in another country’s language. She didn’t understand what I meant, and the class was trying to explain to her that Arabic is the language of the people who were protesting.
After a while, I stopped everyone and asked her where she thought “those people” lived. She said, “I don’t know…near Arizona?”
That is when I realized that she thought the the Middle East was next to the American Midwest! I showed her where it is on the map, and she said, “Oh! Things make so much more sense, now!”
The most intrepid drug seeker I have ever seen was Mr. C.
He walked in a very hunched-over posture, leaning on a walker, to elicit sympathy.
We would not even say his name, as that might bring the bad luck of the ER calling to admit him…AGAIN.
If one of my colleagues were to talk about him he would say, “Mr.” and then crook over his index finger.
We all knew who he meant.
This guy was the biggest pathological liar in the universe.
Every time I’d get a call from the ER his story was different.
He was a missionary, a teacher, a policeman, you name it.
His favorite was to tell people he was a former PA or MD.
ER calls….
“I’ve got a 68-year-old former doctor down here. He looks so decrepit that I think he needs nursing home placement.”
Right away, I knew who it was.
He went from hospital to hospital to hospital. I don’t think he had permanent address. Why would he?
“Uh,…I know who it is. He’s not a doctor. He’s a drug seeker.”
“No, Maureen, he’s such a nice guy. You must be thinking of someone else. I think he IS a doc.”
“Go ask him what a CBC is (complete blood count, a common lab test). I’ll hold.”
Off he goes.
“For Pete’s sake, he doesn’t know.”
“Ah…yup. Don’t give him any narcs.”
“OK. But he still needs admission because he has been having recurrent temperatures and can hardly walk.”
“Did you document a temperature?”
“No, he is afebrile.”
”Labs and imaging normal?”
“Yeah.”
“Wanna see him take up his bed and trot, upright, right out of there?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell him that Dr. Boehm will be admitting him. I’ll be happy to evaluate and treat any of his complaints. I won’t be giving any narcotics, however.”
Off he goes.
“Uh, he got up and left AMA.”
“Did he ask for a cab voucher?”
“Yeah.”
“He wants us to pay for his transportation to the next ER.”
Sometimes, I would come in and he had been admitted overnight by some unsuspecting doctor.
His nurse called me.
“Mr. C is very lethargic. He’s becoming hypoxic”.
“How can that be? He’s not getting any controlled substances.”
Well, he sure was.
He had called down to the OR and interrupted a surgery. He told them that he was one of our orthopedic surgeons. He demanded that a message be given to the Ortho PA.
“Why does Mr. C have uncontrolled pain? I want him on a Dilaudid PCA NOW!”
I walk in. Mr. C, not only has a Dilaudid drip running, in one of his groggy little hands he had a bottle of Percocet that he had brought from home. In the other hand, the button to deliver a hefty bolus of Dilaudid to himself.
He was “out” with a mouthful of half-chewed Percocet, the drip just dripping away with a hefty basal dose.
He could have killed himself.
Never have I relished the delivery of Narcan like I did that day.
One little squirt and he was wide awake and pissed that his nice “double” high was ruined.
After that we had to do a complete search of him and his stuff, with security, so he didn’t get away with it again.
I often wonder what happened to Mr. C after the new system was available to track and prevent his overuse of narcotics.
He couldn’t go to five doctors in a month and get narcs from all of them. He couldn’t go ER to ER.
When I was 15 I used to babysit these 2 super lovely Chinese kids every friday and saturday night. It was only ever for 4 hours, 8pm to midnight. The family owned the local fish and chip shop, that also sold Chinese food. Now I never got fed while babysitting, but the parents would pay me my time AND bring me chinese food to eat when I got home. Always asked me what I wanted when I went to the house. The were an awesome family.
Another time my GP asked if I would babysit his kids on new years eve, and stay over night. My mum agreed and he would pay me £50 for it. I got told to eat and drink whatever I wanted, watch whatever I wanted on the tv, and the room they let me sleep in also had a tv. Easiest babysitting job ever! The kids were in bed before I got there at 9pm, I was told to check on them at 10, 11 and midnight which I did. They never woke up, I got to eat junk food all night, and got paid for doing it. I was actually happier about the junk food and tv than the money. At home I wasnt allowed food between meals, junk food was never allowed, and forget about watching anything other than my mums choice of program on the tv.
I was in the military (USAF) and until you reach a certain rank, you are assigned a roommate in your dorm room. I was stationed in Germany in a unit that traveled extensively 300+ days per year. Commonly we would travel 6 months, come back for a week or even a weekend, and then be back on the road. I was assigned a roommate whom I met… He was the typical “computer geek”. Greasy hair, showered infrequently, was a slob, almost never left the room when he was not on the road, and played a lot of the “Oregon Trail” computer game.
Mind you both of us were in the same unit that traveled a lot, but we were on different teams, so we traveled to different places at different times. One time after being gone 6 months in England, I came back to station, and opened the door to my room, only to be gagged by the smell. I set my luggage down in the hall and went to the communal bathroom, wet some paper towels, and covered my nose and mouth area. Then went back into my room to locate and remove the source of the smell.
At first glance everything seemed in order, but the smell was overpowering… I walked over to his side of the room and it got even worse. His bed was raised up on blocks that gave him a couple feet of storage underneath it, and I saw a shirt sleeve sticking out from under the bed. When I lifted up the bedspread, it reeked to high heaven, but all I could see was his dirty clothes. They were stuffed under his bed to the point that it took up all the room in under the bed! I couldn’t imagine that this horrific gagging smell was just his dirty clothes (although they did stink terribly), so I started reaching under there and pulling clothes out a handful at a time…. When I had pulled out about half the clothes, I found the source of the pugnant aroma.
At some point when he was stuffing all his dirty clothes under there, he apparently forgot that he had also put a half a pitcher of OJ under there as well. When he pushed more clothes under there, the pitcher of OJ got pushed back into the middle of the pile of clothes. I had been gone 6 months and come to find out he left the week after I did! That OJ sat in that pitcher in the middle of his stinky clothes for basically 6 months, rotting! It was a solid black and green mass all around the outside with Orange pulp in the middle, and OMG did it stink. I was gagging and running to the outside trash can holding the pitcher behind me to get rid of it once and for all! Once it was gone, I went back to the room. I stuffed all of his dirty clothes into big black garbage bags, zip tied them, and put them back under his bed.
When he got back the following week I was already gone again, but I left a note for him and told him what had happened and what I had had to do! I also told him if I ever come back to something like that again, that I would be turning it in and reporting him to the First Seargent! It neverhappened again. (THANK GOD!!!))
strong independent woman instantly REGRETS their lifestyle
When I was a toddler my father had an affair. The woman started calling our house and tormenting my mother in order to break up the marriage. My mother wasn’t emotionally stable. After a certain time each evening, she knew that her friends and family wouldn’t be calling so late, and when the phone rang my mother would cry, wail and scream. I remember answering the phone myself in an attempt to stop my mother’s over-the-top reaction and at some point learned to leave the phone off the hook but my mother didn’t leave it that way for long. On some level, she liked the drama I guess. This went on for months. I’d have been 3 or 4 when this was happening. It was very traumatic for me because I had no idea what was going on until much later. In my pre-school mind, the threat on the phone had to be very dire and worthy of my drama momma’s reaction. I was absolutely terrified. I’d wake up many nights to answer the phone and cry “please don’t hurt us” into the phone, but she didn’t stop until the divorce was done.
30 years later, my father dies, leaves that woman a penniless widow, which was the result of gross financial mismanagement because he’d had money and didn’t support those of us in his first family (a man could get away with that back then). The one thing she has is a lawsuit for his death. It’s a good case. The payout is potentially large but that’ll take years in court and may never payout as the company responsible will probably go bankrupt. The defendant has offered settlement and would payout quickly but the only requirement is that all of his heirs agree to accept the settlement and agree not to sue separately at a later date.
But I don’t need money and I’ll never sign. I’ve been getting certified letters for years asking for my signature. They’ve threatened to have me arrested (which was clearly a ruse) for refusing, offered me cash to sign, on one occasion her grandson connected with me on social media explaining that she needed a new roof and could I please sign off on the settlement and I ended up blocking his whole family. Last year I got a letter that the county was going to auction her house for non-payment of taxes. She is probably living with one of her kids and collecting social security so not quite homeless but I still feel like I’ve gotten a little revenge.
Many years ago I lived in an inner suburb of Sydney, in a terrace house.
The next door neighbour was an alcoholic bricklayer. Call him Don.
Don had decided to do some extensions, or renovations, and had three pallets of bricks dropped off in front of his place. They partially blocked the footpath and leaned outwards, dangerously overhanging the road.
One of the.pallets was in front of our house. Effectively our parking was blocked and the footpath was hard to negotiate.
The first Saturday they were there I knocked on his door, (interrupting a fight with his wife as he had accidentally lost her car the previous night, as far as I could work out he had parked it near a brothel and could not find it when he staggered out) and offered to help him shift the bricks around the back. He declined and said he would get to them during the week.
A few weeks went by. I offered again to help shift them, and got told to f off. I explained they were dangerous and inconvenient. Got the door slammed in my face.
I complained to the local council, and I suppose they sent him a letter, but the bricks remained.
By this time the bricks had been there about four months. The pallets were deteriorating and the stacks leaning. It was getting more dangerous by the day. It was only a matter of time before they collapsed on a car, a person or the busy road.
I wrote up a couple of large signs “ free bricks, help yourself” and put them on the pile about 6:am on a Saturday morning.
By the time Don surfaced around 11, there was probably half a pallet or so left… which he moved to his back yard.
Without a doubt. Any unfair action by the EU Will be met by an action that U.S. fairer but with a much bigger consequences to EU. Let that be a solemn promise.
Europe will have to suffer a total collapse of the automobile market if it dare to try any shit. Don’t forget that many European cars companies are surviving only due to the Chinese market and consumer. And the reason it still can compete is only due to its production efficiency and capacity of its plants in China!
Years back, I sat in a sombre home where a young man in his 30s died untimely in an accident.
I, along with my family, went there to pay respects.
Sitting on the sofa I was nudged between two middle aged women who were discussing the next course of events.
“I heard Sheela is going to go to her maternal house to stay! How would Usha bear this? First she lost her son and now with the daughter-in-law gone she will lose her grandchildren too.”
“That’s true! I had the same reaction when I heard about it. We must put some sense in Usha and stop her from letting Sheela go.”
When Usha aunty came towards us, these two woman grabbed her and made her sit with them, squeezing me.
They then narrated their opinion on the grieving mother and stopped her from taking a ‘foolish’ decision and going against a tradition where the widow usually stays with the in-laws.
After listening to their valuable advice Usha aunty spoke.
“True, I lost my son. But Sheela has lost her husband too. A person she vowed to spend her old age together. A person who was a loving parent to their children. Sending them away to her parents place will surely make me sad and lonely but it would be a much needed change for Sheela. At this time, she needs her parents the most. If she stays here, this house would remind her of him everyday. At her parents place, she would slowly come back to her usual self soon. I lost my son. I don’t want to lose my daughter because of some tradition.”
The two women were speechless, so was I. I hadn’t thought of it in that way either. Usha aunty left and consoled her daughter-in-law who sat in a corner with a pale and teary face.
That day it was just a conversation I unknowingly was a part of. But today, I think what Usha aunty did was so right.
Thinking about someone else in the event of your child dying, needs immense amount of courage and determination.
Sheela di did recover soon and moved back to her loving mother-in-law’s house and now cares for them as their daughter.
Man went to McDonald’s — which was a treat — for his family’s dinner, and on the way back, was broad-sided in the driver’s door. He’s dead in the driver’s seat and his family’s dinner is all over the front of the car. When he didn’t come back, his 10-year-old son went looking for him on his bicycle and came up on the accident scene. The child climbed into the wrecked car and was hugging his dead father. We weren’t going to stop him, and the fire department stayed longer than they normally would have in case there was any unexpected fire.
Another officer took the child home in his police car and informed the wife of what had happened. Prime example of one of those evenings when a cop skips dinner because he has no appetite.
The driver that hit him was a teenager who had just stolen a tank of gas from the local AM/PM Mini Market, and was being chased by the idiot store manager in his own car. We arrested them both, though that did not make the outcome any better.
The only decent thing that came out of it is that the owner of a local McDonald’s franchise read about it, came in the station and we helped him arrange to pay for an elaborate funeral. The owner insisted we not talk about it publicly; he didn’t want his kind act to look like a PR move. That is class.
J.K. Rowling had just got a divorce, was on government aid, and could barely afford to feed her baby in 1994, just three years before the first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone, was published. When she was shopping it out, she was so poor she couldn’t afford a computer or even the cost of photocopying the 90,000-word novel, so she manually typed out each version to send to publishers. It was rejected dozens of times until finally Bloomsbury, a small London publisher, gave it a second chance after the CEO’s eight year-old daughter fell in love with it.
Positivity, confidence, and persistence are key in life, so NEVER GIVE UP on yourself.
This Thing Is About To POP: Putin, Biden and The Trainwreck
This was one that I witnessed, but wasn’t a part of.
I was working in the hardware section of a department store, right beside the sports department.
Straightening up/stocking the shelves just near the boundary between the departments, I saw a fellow salesperson talking to a customer with his small son. The child was bored and started to wander around, touching everything he could reach.
After a couple of minutes, the other salesperson saw the child start to try to climb a display of weightlifting equipment. He quickly excused himself and rushed over to the child, not touching him but gently suggesting that the boy not climb on anything and particularly not on the heavy weights.
The father turned around and seeing what was happening was incensed.
“How dare you tell my son what he can and cannot do! Who do you think you are?”
“I was just trying to keep him safe.” said the salesperson. “The weights are heavy and he could hurt himself.”
“Oh really? You have no business disciplining my son. I want to see the manager to complain.” said the father.
By this time, the child, seeing that he was again being ignored, went back to the weight rack and started to climb again.
The father fumed on at the unlucky salesperson.
And just at that moment, the rack of weights, unbalanced by the child fell over on top of him, a couple of weights pinning him to the floor.
He started crying.
The father started ranting about suing the store.
I later heard that he lost because the salesperson had tried to stop the child from climbing and had been forbidden from doing so by the father.
I got a performance review that ripped me up, down and sideways, and was totally unjustified. I refused to sign it and requested a second meeting later that afternoon. I attended that one armed with statistics showing how I had reduced the work ticket backlog on our software library from over 800 to just 2.
Now, a little technical explanation. This was pre-Windows. We had a software library written in Microsoft Pro Basic. Everything worked for the most part when I took it over, except it was slow. I fixed the outstanding bugs, then went looking for the cause of the slowdown and I found it: type declarations.
There were none. If a variable name ended with a $, it was a string. Otherwise, it was a number. But there are all kinds of numbers, and the default was double-precision floating point. Microsoft made a big deal about how indexes and array subscripts should be integers and pointed out that it was a speed deal. I went through, explicitly defined all variables and made sure that anything used as a loop index or array subscript was declared as either a short or long integer. Massive increase in speed. Calculations that used to take 20–30 minutes now ran in a minute or less.
Now, back to the meeting. I pointed all the improvements out to him, including comments from customers praising the improvements. He looked at everything and had the gall to say that my review was not going to be changed. I walked back to my office, made a couple of phone calls and had a job, paying more, starting the following Monday. I then edited the library and took out every one of the integer or long type declarations, recompiled the new version and saved everything into the distribution folders. I cleaned out all my work directories so that what I had done was not readily available, then walked by his office, tossed my keys on his desk, said I quit and walked out.
I had applied for a promotion that I was overqualified for. Had a great track record of mentoring new employees, working above and beyond, coming up with great ideas. I had been in the position for 7 years and with the company for 11.
My manager and supervisor told me that I wasn’t “ready” for this promotion (a 6% raise) and that I could try again next January. I told them “there would not be a next January”
Fast forward a few months, I was already applying for jobs and went on a few interviews. My manager and supervisor called me into a meeting to let me know one of the males on the team who have been at the organization and position for 2.5 years was getting the promotion (it was a promotion multiple people could get). When they asked me if I had any questions I said “No – his promotion doesn’t age t my career”
1 month later when I was putting in my 2 weeks notice for a company giving me a 30% raise my manager and supervisor asked me what they could do to retain me…I say nothing.
Left the job May 2021 and it was the best decision ever. Never knew I could get such a big pay bump for NOT being loyal to a company.
And if you are going to do it, this is the way. Not by shooting somebody or anything else.
My dad was a small builder. A few houses a year. He enjoyed it and it made him good money in retirement. He was building one of the only spec houses (not already sold when he started) he ever built.
One night, when the house was almost done, the furnace and airhandler disappeared from the garage. No signs of breaking and entering.
Now it takes a couple of hours to remove all of this w/o damaging anything. So my dad quickly guessed that his HVAC contractor (one he had never used before) had made a copy of the key my dad had given him. Let himself in, opened the garage door. Backed his truck in. Closed the door. And got to work.
He told the police this. They talked to the contractor who denied everything and suggested my dad had done it to collect on the builder’s insurance. This made my dad MAD! The HVAC guy however didn’t know the police told my dad he said this.
So my dad had the same guy put a new furnace and airhandler in the house. Yep, same guy.
What the guy didn’t know is that before hand my dad had a security system installed. Hidden motion detectors only, no contacts on the windows and doors to be spotted. And no audible alarm. Silent only. He registered his cell phone with the security company.
Sure enough, a few nights later he gets a call in the middle of the night from the security company. He tells them to call 911 and jumps in his truck. By the way, he lived only about 90 seconds down the road.
He pulls up and can see light around the garage door. He pulled quietly into the driveway at an angle, all the way up to the door, completely blocking it. And quietly waited for the police to arrive, which they did a few minutes later.
The guy heard him talking to the police in the driveway and put the garage door up. My dad couldn’t stop laughing at the expression on the guy’s face when he saw my dad standing there with four deputies!
And the best part? My dad hadn’t yet paid the contractor for his work. And he never did.
This actually happened to me years ago. It was a Friday evening. An entire group including me were in a meeting. We had a code thoroughly tested and ready for production. This Manager went and made changes without consent and broke the code but they still wants to keep the implementation date which was ten days away.
Now the ten days included two weekends. I’m sitting in the room. They totally ignored the fact that I was the one responsible for testing the changes. Nobody asked me what my plans were for the weekends and proceeded to agree upon meeting the date. I stayed mute. Now at that time my husband was in the army and and deployed to Bosnia, so they thought I had no life. They talked and laughed and when the meeting was over, I spoke.
“Who is coming in tomorrow because I need a ride”. They all said they were not. That’s when I dropped the bomb. I said, “Neither am I”. Everybody sat down, I got up, saluted them and walked out.
I had just finished a year of substitute teaching and had few. if any, prospects for a full-time job come that Fall. So when I saw that ad in the paper, my eyes lit up.
This company was wanting to hire teachers for a summer job. Was it evaluating textbooks? Maybe we would be tasked with creating exciting curriculum or conducting research into how children learn. Maybe a private school wanted to hire a number of tutors for their summer programs? The ad didn’t get specific.
I fired off a resume and waited to hear back. I didn’t wait long before being contacted with a time and place for the interview. When I arrived, I saw a room full of people dressed in typical teacher fashion-Dockers, Polo shirt, etc. I must be in the right place! But why are they doing a group interview? A bit later, a man walks in dressed more professionally. He asks us to tae a seat. He then gives a presentation into what sort of summer work they had for all of us education professionals.
STEAK KNIVES!!! He was wanting to “hire us to be door-to-door salesmen for his company’s line of cutlery. For a low investment of only (the cost of 2 sets) we could have unlimited earning potential. He must have seen the disgusted look on my face and figured I was going to let the more naive know exactly what the deal was, for I was the first to be invited into the office for a second interview.
It showed clearly that it does not care for its people but it protect profiteering and too big to fail companies. Such actions never ends well. The day will come when the U.S. citizens rebel and raised up against them. And these companies will continue to be unproductive and inefficient to the point of becoming irrelevant.
Pease remember the US has been dictating free trade and freedom of choice to Americans and the world for the longest time! What happened?
An abandoned mall in Ohio
Little Italy Sausage Soup
This tasty and easy Italian Sausage Soup Recipe is loaded with onions, carrots, celery, zucchini, and a healthy helping of Italian Seasoning in chicken broth with tomatoes, cannellini beans, and elbow noodles. It is the perfect pick-me-up for cold, wet weather, coughs, ailments, or just because your soul needs a little warmth. This Italian Soup Recipe is one of our favorites.
Ingredients
2 pounds mild or hot Italian sausage
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 large onions, chopped
1 (28 ounce) can diced tomatoes
6 (14 ounce) cans beef broth
1 1/2 cups red wine (optional)
1/2 teaspoon basil
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
2 teaspoons hot pepper sauce
3 tablespoons parsley
1 medium green bell pepper, chopped
2 medium zucchini, sliced
3 cups pasta shells, cooked
Instructions
In a large pot, cook sausage for about 15 minutes.
Pierce with fork to release fat; drain well.
Cut into bite-size pieces.
Add remaining ingredients except zucchini and pasta.
Cook for 30 to 45 minutes, then add zucchini and cook until tender.
Add pasta shells just to heat through.
Recipe notes and helpful tips
If you have a nearby meat market, call and ask if they make their own Italian Sausage. It is well worth the added expense and trip to the market.
For aesthetic purposes, peel the carrots. It brings out that beautiful bright orange color.
You can sub any medium to small pasta in this soup, including penne, rotini, shells, farfalle, ditalini, or radiatori.
Fresh thyme is always delicious, and I usually have it on hand. However, you can substitute fresh chopped parsley or a little dried marjoram or thyme.
Store leftovers in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to 4 days. Heat on the stovetop over low heat or in the microwave at reduced power.
Freeze in an airtight container or heavy-duty freezer bag for up to 3 months.
One summer as a college student (many years ago) I worked at a now defunct “family” restaurant called The Ground Round. One room was a bar, and the other room was for families and they were famous for showing old silent movies in the family room and giving out free peanuts and popcorn (that usually ended up all over the floor).
Unfortunately, they were also famous for their “Penny-a-Pound” Thursdays where children under 12 who accompanied an adult would be weighed on a big scale at the front of the restaurant and could then order anything off the children’s menu (including unlimited free drinks) and be changed a penny for each pound they weighed. So, yeah, a kid could order a hot dog or a hamburger or a bowl of mac&cheese and get an orange soda (with 3 refills) for $0.40.
Most of this time this worked out OK and people enjoyed the deal responsibly. A family of four would come in, say, both parents would order full meals, and the little ones would get to basically eat for free. However, there were quite a number of occasions when people would completely abuse the deal. We’re talking situations where a single adult would come in with 5 or 6 children (obviously not all their own kids due to them all being the same age), the adult would order something cheap like a bowl of soup, and then the kids would proceed to make my life a living hell by constantly ordering drink refills every single time I walked past them on my way to take care of my other tables.
That wasn’t the worst part, though. No, the worst part was when it came time to pay the bill and the cost would end up being something like $9.27. And the person paying the bill would leave a $10 bill and say “keep the change.”
ALL the waiters dreaded having to work the main room on Thursdays, but since I was the newest employee there I ended up having to do it every week.
Dave was bragging to his boss one day, “You know, I know everyone there is to know. Just name someone, anyone, and I know them.”
Tired of his boasting, his boss called his bluff, “OK, Dave, how about Tom Cruise?”
“No drama’s boss, Tom and I are old friends, and I can prove it.”
So Dave and his boss fly out to Hollywood and knock on Tom Cruise’s door and Tom Cruise shouts, “Dave! What’s happenin?!? Great to see you! Come on in for a beer!”
Although impressed, Dave’s boss is still sceptical. After they leave Cruise’s house, he tells Dave that he thinks him knowing Cruise was just lucky.
“No, no, just name anyone else,” Dave says.
“President Bush,” his boss quickly retorts.
“Yup,” Dave says, “Old buddies, let’s fly out to Washington.”
And off they go.
At the White House, Bush spots Dave on the tour and motions him and his boss over, saying, “Dave, what a surprise, I was just on my way to a meeting, but you and your friend come on in and let’s have a cup of coffee first and catch up.”
Well, the boss is very shaken by now but still not totally convinced. After they leave the White House grounds he expresses his doubts to Dave, who again implores him to name anyone else.
“The pope,” his boss replies.
“Sure!” says Dave. “My folks are from Poland, and I’ve known the Pope a long time.”
So off they fly to Rome. Dave and his boss are assembled with the masses in Vatican Square when Dave says, “This will never work. I can’t catch the Pope’s eye among all these people. Tell you what, I know all the guards so let me just go upstairs and I’ll come out on the balcony with the Pope.”
And he disappears into the crowd headed toward the Vatican. Sure enough, half an hour later Dave emerges with the Pope on the balcony but by the time Dave returns, he finds that his boss has had a heart attack and is surrounded by paramedics. Working his way to his boss’ side, Dave asks him, “What happened?”
His boss looks up and says, “I was doing fine until you and the Pope came out on the balcony and the man next to me said, “Who the fuck is that on the balcony with Dave?
My uncle was a functional alcoholic. He had an advanced degree and was extremely accomplished in his career. He never did the kinds of things that would result in legal problems, he didn’t drink and drive, didn’t get in fights, or commit crimes. He and his husband were wealthy. They had a house with a swimming pool in a HCOL area. He was well-loved by everyone in the family but no one was able to get him to stop drinking or seek help for it. By and large, no one really wanted to argue with him about it either because it was pointless.
My uncle died during the pandemic and it wasn’t due to COVID. He drank everyday starting early in the morning and continuing through the night. He had done this for as long as I can remember. He cared about his appearance but completely neglected his health and refused to see doctors probably because they would tell him what he didn’t want to hear -alcohol was killing him.
Heavy drinking doesn’t only affect the liver — although that would be bad enough in itself — it also messes up the functioning of multiple other organs and body systems including, but not limited to, the heart, brain, kidneys, digestive system, and the nervous system. In my uncle’s case, he developed a cardiac problem and died suddenly. For many other alcoholics, dying is a slow, painful decline that involves a lot of suffering drawn out over many years.
Even if a person manages to avoid major illness, alcoholism, whether functional or not, does not make for a happy, fulfilled life. By nature, alcoholism requires that people prioritize alcohol over and above everything else in their lives, including all the meaningful things like important relationships, personal values, activities that bring joy, and personal accomplishments.
A person who drinks their way through life is never really present in their life and thus misses out on fully experiencing life itself. It may be feel pleasant to temporarily numb or black out distressing emotions but this comes at the cost of numbing positive emotions too. It comes at the cost of losing intimacy in your relationships, or just losing relationships altogether. It comes at a cost of not being able to remember your life or make good decisions.
Alcoholism and addiction in general, whether functional or not, is sad. It’s sad to see people searching for life satisfaction in the one place it will never be found.
Have you heard that “African babies cry less”? It is true, but the why of it is more interesting. They cry less because they are attended to. They are carried by their mothers, they co-sleep. They are always with their mother, who nurses the baby as soon as it starts to fuss. Doesn’t matter if it’s for comfort, for hunger or thirst. The baby never gets to the point where it *has to* cry.
Crying is the only way a baby has to communicate…..sort of. They also wiggle, and fuss and make weird faces and reach toward something, and when none of the rest of it works, THEN they cry. So it might be better to say that crying is the LAST way babies communicate. Even so, they can’t tell you they had a bad dream, or their stomach is upset, or there’s a string wrapped around their toe and it feels weird, or they have an itch but no fine motor skills to scratch with. We have to learn to decode baby language other than crying, before it gets to that. And we don’t.
You can’t spoil a baby. Moreover, when did giving someone attention get such a bad rep? Why is it bad to give a baby attention? What defines ‘too much’ attention, and why should we ration it? Is there a limited amount available? What idiot made this up?
By giving a baby the attention it needs when it needs it, and not when you feel like giving it, or when some book says you should give it, you teach the baby that you are always there for it. You aren’t teaching them to be clingy, you are teaching them that no matter what they do, what new things they explore, you will be there. It gives them confidence to try and do new things, knowing this.
But let a baby go untended until he gets to the point of crying, and then wait some more? What good does that do? The baby is not going to become less hungry or thirsty or scared or wet. Baby isn’t going to decide, oh, I guess I wasn’t actually hungry after all, I guess I’ll stop now. It will cause a lot of stress hormones to be released in the baby’s brain. A baby who cries until he stops has given up on you. He’s learned that you are NOT going to be there for him, and his needs might not be met. That, in his desperation, he reached out to you and you turned away.
Soon enough, he or she will be telling you not to hold their hand at school, or kiss them goodbye in front of their friends. The time when they need and depend on you is only a small part of their lives, and yours, so you should enjoy it while you can.
It’s really hard to fire someone in the government, but if they are an intern, it’s pretty easy.
We had three people start at the same time as interns. The two women were fantastic, interested in learning the job, hard working, never called out, etc. but “Charles”, not so much. I had just been promoted to supervisor. A week after he started, he stuck his head in my office and offered to help me with my supervisory duties. He didn’t know how to do the work yet, but he was going to help me supervise. Got it.
A couple days later, he walks into my office, plops down in a chair and says “I don’t know how you work with some of these fucking bitches. Those dumb cunts deserve to be fired”. Now I’m not a prude, but I also behave and speak in a professional manner. I had done nothing to make Charles think my office was some “safe zone”, where he could denigrate other employees, or use that kind of language.
He would sleep at his desk, call out, leave early, not what you would expect from any professional, let alone an intern trying to make their mark.
A lot of our job entailed technical writing. He wasn’t much of a writer to begin with, and often sent supposedly final versions of documents on the the next department with track changes and edits still in them. I had to fix a lot of his supposedly finished work. .
The crown jewel was him loudly proclaiming that life would be great in two months as he would no longer be an intern, so it would be near impossible to fire him. He was fired the next day.
I had to let an employee go when I owned a security guard company. He’d been involved in a fatal shooting — he killed a man who’d fired at him — before I bought the business and he shot and killed a drunk who attacked him after I took over.
After the second shooting my insurance carrier gave me an ultimatum: Fire the employee or lose my insurance. I promised them that I would not allow him to carry a weapon and that I would assign him to my office as Operations Manager but they would not budge. I had to choose between him and insurance coverage but without insurance I was out of business.
I called everyone I knew in the business trying to find him another job. They all knew about the shootings so they weren’t interested. So I began reaching out to my clients. My guy was ex-military and very smart and I hoped that one of them might be interested in him.
It turned out that a car dealer I was providing patrol coverage to was thinking about taking his security in-house so he agreed to talk with my employee.
Long story short, I lost a $1,000 a month patrol contract but the guard was hired by the car dealer. I haven’t spoken with my ex-employee in years but the last time I did he was head of security for the dealer, in charge of 4 different car lots. Like I said, he is very smart.
I’m from Russia. Below are a few things I almost always have to explain or discuss with visitors from Russia.
1. Why individual houses are so large? We always get into discussion that house is not just a shelter, but also a manifestation of one’s financial achievements.
2. Philanthropy. There is no culture of philanthropy in Russia and many view American philanthropy either as a waste of money or as some intricate plot to get some additional benefits.
3. People don’t walk places. They go everywhere by a car.
4. There is almost no public transportation except in a few large cities. People actually have to have cars to get places. Cars are necessity, not luxury.
5. Majority of high and middle schools have sport facilities of very high, almost professional quality.
6. Many schools have orchestras, bands, theaters of a very high, almost professional quality. Free.
7. Every state has a lot of autonomy.
8. President’s salary is comparable with the one of a plastic surgeon.
9. President doesn’t automatically become the richest person in the country.
10. Majority of things in the US aren’t controlled or regulated by the government.
11. Children are expected to leave home when they are 18.
12. Students prefer and are expected to live in a dorm and not with parents.
13. When relatives visit they often stay in the hotel.
14. Many children, even in well to do families, work in fast food, car washes and do a lot of other things to get money and it is not an embarrassment.
15. Parents have their babies sleeping in separate rooms almost from the day of their birth.
16. Russians find 11-15 are particularly absurd, offensive, and egotistical.
17. Many Russians believe that American system of primary and secondary education is very inefficient. As a mother, I have to explain that it is very diverse and essentially even in the poorest districts there are tons of resources available for children who are willing to use them. There are also an opportunity for kids to take advanced and extra advanced classes providing they are willing and able to do the work. And this differentiation is available as early as elementary school.
18. How well elderly live, even those on SSI and Medicaid. How many services are available to them.
19. How open Americans are about their shortcomings and always ready for self criticism.
20. Millions of people don’t have medical insurance.
21. Some hospitals look like five-star hotels.
22. Budgets of some hospitals are equal to h/c budgets of small countries.
23. Doctors tell their patients everything.
24. Return policies and free refill.
25. Idea of a liberal art education. In Russia, after high school graduation, a student should decide on vocation: engineer, doctor, teacher, lawyer, accountant, etc. It seems inconceivable to attend a university and then to graduate without a solid specialty. I often have to explain that not knowing what one wants to do after high school is an acceptable norm in US. A student can still acquire marketable skills, expand his or horizons, get a job after graduation, and, what is even more surprising, obtain an advance degree in a totally different field later. Yes, accountant can attend a medschool and become a doctor and musician can go for aa master degree in computer science.
Long ago when the no bra and see through crazes overlapped for a while (late 70s I believe) I had a young lady walk into my 1st Period class with no bra and a see through blouse. I took roll while the students started a mini lesson on the board. Then I started to write a note I intended to give to her to go to the office for a ruling/talking to by a female counselor. I had just started when the young lady called to me “Mister, tell them to stop staring at me!” I looked up and of course every boy in class (11th grade) was staring, standing to see over other students etc. Before I could say anything another girl loudly proclaimed “If you don’t want them looking, why did you dress like that?” Another girl handed the young lady a sweater jacket to put on. Then the young lady came up and whispered “May I have a bathroom pass?”
I gave it to her and put my note aside to see what happened. 10–15 minutes later she came back wearing an over sized PE uniform t-shirt over her clothes, handed the sweater back to the girl it belonged to, looked at me and then at the one who had spoken up and in a very soft voice said “I guess I didn’t think. It won’t happen again.” It didn’t.
On October 25, 2009, I was working like I always did and my supervisor came up and asked if I wanted an early out. I didn’t usually take early outs because I was a single mom and my supervisors knew it. I shocked him because I agreed to leave early. I said it’d be nice to have some extra time with my kids. I went to the babysitter’s house and her brother told me that she took my kids to her grandparents farm and he’d let her know to bring them straight home when they got back. I left there and at a stop sign and ambulance went flying past me and I had such a strong urge to follow it but I talked myself out of it. I went home and was pulling stuff out of the fridge when my phone rang. It was the sitter’s cousin asking me where my kids were and I told her they were with Nikki and then she told me that Nikki was in a head on accident and they may have to life fight her. She swore my kids weren’t with Nikki and I knew they had to be. After that Nikki’s boyfriend called me and told me that Nikki and my kids were in a head on accident and I must have let out a really loud scream because my neighbors heard me in their house. I called my parents as I rushed out the door and I asked them to keep me calm until I found my kids because they were in a head on accident. I didn’t even notice my neighbor standing in the yard. Apparently they heard about the wreck on the scanner and then heard me scream so they’d came out to drive me wherever I needed but I didn’t hear him talk to me. I was too focused. I had no idea where to go so I decided to go straight out the direction that I saw the ambulance go earlier. I came up to an accident and I tried to get past all of the cars and a police officer stopped me and said I couldn’t go any further. I told him it was my kids without knowing 100% at the time but just by my gut feeling. He called ahead to another officer and he said they were okay but my son’s face was cut a little bit from the airbag and his glasses. They allowed me to drive up to the ambulance but I still wasn’t allowed to see my kids. I followed them to the hospital. From the look of the truck, I knew the police officer was wrong. It took over 2 hours to be able to see my kids from the first call. I only got to see them when once the arrived at the hospital. My son’s face wasn’t just cut a little it was several cuts and two black eyes. My son ended up with permanent brain damage that was diagnosed later on. He didn’t want to walk and we just thought it was because he was scared so we carried him home. He’d just crawl on the floor and not walk. When we took him to his so called specialist, he told me I needed to institutional him because he’d never be able to learn again because he no longer had a short term memory and part of his long term memory was gone. I fired him and worked to teach my son how to walk, use the bathroom, and worked with him on his schooling. I’d enrolled in college just to help him learn. I needed to know how the brain worked to teach him and him retain things. He did learn it and more after I was told he never would. He also had whiplash extremely bad. Our attorney found it in the x-rays but the hospital never mentioned it. My daughter had to be potty trained again and she had severe whiplash along with a severe concussion. For the police to tell me they were fine I knew they weren’t. especially after seeing the truck. II wish my intuition was wrong that day. I’m fortunate that I didn’t lose my kids but we still lost my son as we knew him. When my older kids saw the actual changes in him they broke down crying. Fortunately it wasn’t all at the same time. As for the child the told me to institutionalize because he’d never learn again and could never live alone, He proved them all wrong. He’s got an amazing job, lives on his own, drives himself to work, and is having a babe in a couple weeks. He thanks me all the time for not giving up on him. He and his sister are best friends because she stood up for him when he couldn’t. I hope I never ever get the urge to follow an ambulance again. That’s not something I’d normally do so that day I had gut feeling and I was right. BTW, the engine was pushed all the way to sit in the back seat where my daughter was sitting. Her seatbelt wouldn’t work so she wasn’t fastened in thank God. If my kids would of say any other way I probably would of lost one if not both. Good was looking out for my kids that day. I’ll never ever forget that day.
Tuscan-Style Ribollita
Ingredients
6 slices (1/2-inch thick) day-old crusty French bread
3 cloves garlic
Black pepper, to taste
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon chicken broth
1 onion, diced
3 carrots, chopped
3 celery stalks, chopped
1 zucchini, sliced
1 yellow squash, sliced
1/2 sweet red pepper, diced
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
4 cups torn escarole or dark cabbage
1 (16 ounce) can kidney beans
1 (14 1/2 ounce) can plum tomatoes, drained, juices reserved
1 cup chicken broth
3 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese
Oregano leaves (garnish)
Instructions
Grease a baking sheet. Put the bread on the sheet and bake at 350 degrees F until golden brown, about 15 minutes.
Remove from the oven.
Cut 1 garlic clove in half and rub on each side of the toast slices. Sprinkle with black pepper and set aside.
Heat the oil and broth mixture in a 4-quart pot. Add the onions and sauté until tender, about 10 minutes.
Mince the remaining garlic. Add the garlic, carrots and celery to the pot. Cover and cook, stirring occasionally, for 10 minutes.
Add the zucchini, squash, sweet peppers and oregano; cook for 5 minutes.
Add the escarole, beans and tomatoes; cook until the escarole wilts, about 2 minutes.
Add black pepper. Pour the vegetable mixture into a 3-quart casserole and top with the toast.
In a large measuring cup, combine the reserved tomato juice and the broth; pour over the toast. Sprinkle with Parmesan.
Bake at 375 degrees F until the cheese has melted, about 30 minutes.
One night as I proceeded through an intersection when the light turned green I heard a car accelerate and saw it nearly t bone me. I made the stop and saw it was a local shithead kid I knew well as having a major chip on his shoulder. He blamed his faulty brakes to which I replied I’d have to impound his car for a safety inspection. At this point he changes his story and tries to reach down and roll the floor mat under his brake pedal to blame for the incident. I issued him summonses for unsafe speed, running a light a failure to yield with the warning to keep it on the straight and narrow. A short time later I received a call for a 911 hangup at his address. The door opened and a middle aged male walks out. I ask him if he was the homeowner and if everything is OK. He addresses me by name and says he’s a corrections officer and asks why his son was not given a courtesy and gives me a rehash of his sons version of events. I ask him if he called 911 over this event and he said yes he was trying to lodge a complaint against me. I replied that his son is a liar and that’s not what 911 is for. He went on grumbling about courtesy and I shot back neither you nor your kid know the meaning of the word. After that incident the kid was noticeably quieter during the numerous encounters we had with him and his delinquent crowd.
Yep, had a woman who did the same job as me on alternate days and was jealous as I was asked to do the important stuff so to speak on my shifts and not her, the boss, female would confide in me and not her as she was a straight out the door on the dot person and would never cover in an emergency etc. She started to file fake complaints on night reports …he didn’t do this etc but of course we had CCTV. She would send watsapp messages to me complaining and then the best one…my wife is Asian…one night she sent a message insulting my wife and Asian women calling them Ting Tongs and Asian brides.
What she failed to realise is that the CEO despite having an English surname through marriage was Asian. I simply replied… our Thai CEO will enjoy reading that
Years ago I was driving home from a night out in Memphis, TN. It was roughly 3 AM, and I was driving about 60 to 65 mph along Walnut Grove Rd through Shelby Farms. The speed limit stepped up from 40 mph to 55 mph pretty close to that spot, and I don’t recall which side I was on. As it turned out, it didn’t matter. I saw the reflection of my headlights on his patrol car and started to pull over before his blue lights came on. Once stopped, I rolled down my window and had my license and registration ready for him when he walked up to talk to me. He looked at them, at me, and at the officer decal on my windshield and said I could go. Greatly surprised, I asked him why, and I would never have predicted his response. “You pulled over so fast and in such a short distance that I don’t even have to go around [a mile or so down the road to a break in the median] and come back to my spot [where he had set his speed trap].” I was not intoxicated, and I was far from the fastest car to travel that road. But at that particular time I was the only driver around, so I got his attention. The whole thing was a bit surreal, but I was grateful for the outcome. I thanked him and went home to get some sleep.
I called for what I said was, I guess, a welfare check. I saw a young girl, probably mid-teens, walking on the rural road near where we live. I didn’t think much about it, even though there are few people who walk on that road, and very few homes. Later, as I returned home, I found her walking up the even more rural road leading up the mountain to where we live. I stopped and asked if she needed a ride. To my surprise, she said yes (her a young girl, me an old man). I asked her where she was going, and she said to visit someone. We passed my house, and she said to stop at a neighbor’s house. I asked who she was seeing, since I knew our neighbors, and she just said, “Someone.” I let her out and went home. I had to leave a while later and found her walking back down at the bottom of the mountain on the road near where I first saw her. I had also noticed that she had taken off her jacket and dropped it on the road. At that point I called the police and said that I was worried about her. I described her and told the 911 operator where she was. A short time after that a police car passed me going in that direction. I did not see the girl later when I returned home. I don’t know what happened, but she seemed troubled in some way, and was definitely acting odd. I hope the police gave her a ride home, or helped her with whatever her problem was, but I have no idea.
Ladies, this is the worst expression you could tell a man. Don’t tell him all men are the same because no one told you to try them all.
Men do not like to be told what to do and how to do it all the time.
When you ask stupid questions like “Do I look fat to you?” “Do you still love your ex?” “When I grow old, will you still love me?” “Do you think that woman is more beautiful than me?”
We all hate it when you bring up old things every time we fight.
Talking to your Friends about Anything and Everything
Men don’t like it when you talk about your exes, especially if you do it a lot or bring up details.
Even if you are just friends, men hate to be friend-zoned.
I was the IT manager at one of the Maryland Job Corp centers. I was in the process of upgrading government cast off computer equipment from 486s to Pentium Ones, if that tells u how long ago.
Being a nonsmoker, I never take breaks. Ever. I was coming across campus carrying 4 CPUs. I walk really fast so it alway looked like I was running to other staff. They’d joke about me working so hard, so fast. I stopped outside the admin building to catch up with the HR assistant. I was changing her computer next. In front of probably 10 of these smokers, my boss, the director of Finance and Administration took a puff and asked, “Christine, isn’t there someplace you should be?”
Dead, shocked silence.
The 60 hours I’d put in the week before, being forced to sign something that I was volunteering so wasn’t paid OT, and this comment flashed thru my mind.
I took a breath, bit back my inner voice’s come backs, smiled and set the computers down on the sidewalk.
I said, “There sure is.”. Smiled, walked inside, got my keys and kept walking.
When my older son was 7 (he’s about to be 28), the school nurse called because my son had an accident on the playground and sustained a large bump/knot to the center of his forehead. They said he was fine, but that I should probably take him to the doctor just to be sure. The nurse kept… almost giggling?… and when I asked what happened, she reiterated that he was okay, but that he would best be able to explain when I got there.
i should probably mention that he was already a big nerd, an advanced reader who used words many adults didn’t even use and wasn’t athletic AT ALL. He didn’t like to sweat or get dirty and was always afraid of injuring himself. Needless to say, all the way to the school I was perplexed at what MY KID could’ve possibly been doing so carelessly or vigorously on that playground to have injured himself.
When I got there he was embarrassed and mad af at himself but also laughing and I will never forget what he said. “My arch nemesis challenged me to a duel and I won. And it felt so good I couldn’t hold it in. I did a victory lap, but was stupid and did it with my eyes closed and ran into the tether ball pole. Mom, I gloated too hard.”
Months after buying a security guard company, from my former employer. one of my guards was involved in a fatal shooting at a nightclub. A drunk wielding a tire iron ran at him and the guard shot him once, through the heart, from about six feet away.
Houston Police investigated and eventually the guard was no-billed, meaning a grand jury declined to indict my guy, but that didn’t stop the drunk’s family from filing a wrongful death suit against the club and my company. My liability insurer wound up settling my part of the suit for $30,000 but after doing so they blindsided me by insisting that I fire the guard.
A couple of years earlier, while working for the man I bought the company from, he was involved in another fatal shooting at an apartment complex. In that case, a man shot at him from across a courtyard and his return fire struck the man in the head, killing him instantly. No lawsuit was filed in that case but my insurer still believed that two fatal shootings in such a short time indicated that the guard was too much of a liablility, so I was told to fire him or they’d cancel my coverage. I proposed giving him a job in my office so he wouldn’t be working a post, but the insurance company wouldn’t budge. I had 25 other fulltime employees to consider so I had to let the man go.
But I knew that a car dealer I provided security for was considering taking their security in-house, meaning they’d hire guards directly who’d work for the dealership. I talked with the owner and told him that my (former) guard would be a great choice to run his security team and, after checking the guy out, he agreed. I wound up selling my company and leaving Houston 10 years after I fired the guard but we’d stayed in touch over the years so I had a chance to visit with him before I left. He’d left the car dealership and was assistant security director for Occidental Petroleum. He said my firing him was the best thing that ever happened to him.
I use an iPad mounted facing down and connected to a projector as a document projector. The mount is flexible, so I can aim the iPad at the class, if I want to. If I suspect that students are cheating when I’m not looking, I just set the iPad to record a video or time-lapse, then quietly flex the mount, so the iPad is pointed at the students.
Then I walk around the room, making sure to turn my back on the students I suspect are cheating.
Then, I come back to the iPad and stop the video.
Finally, at the end of the quiz or test, I turn on the projector and show the students the beginning of the video I made. I pause it just a few seconds in, so they can think about the fact that I caught them on camera, and I ask the students to be honest with themselves and me. If they were cheating, let me know, before I see it in the video. It’s the right thing to do.
Most of them confess right then and there. Some of them don’t. We have to watch the video together and I have to point to the moment when they’re cheating.
If they know they cheated, but don’t confess, I show their parents the video.
Nazis had a pretty weird thing about blonde, blue eyed babies.
During Hitler’s rise to power, he initiated a program to raise the percentage of Aryan children. This was called a Lebensborn
program.
They basically made every available child to be in peak physical condition and made to match the Aryan race standards.
This included treatments such as: a very strict diet, early indoctrination with Nazi ideologies and even the usage of ultraviolet rays for hair color (in case a baby wasn’t blonde enough)
Most children came from German impregnated moms but after WWII started , the Nazis encouraged SS soldiers to ‘’get to know’’ the beautiful girls of Europe. They captured not only the best countries, but also the most Aryan girls 😉
If those ladies got pregnant, and their children were deemed as desirable, they were sent to a Lebensborn house where their kids would get a treatment like the one written above. The main ‘’factory’’ (besides Germany) was Norway, with 12.000 kids born during WWII.
When there were not enough moms available, the SS would simply kidnap children that fit their Aryan standards, as Himmler himself said
‘’It is our duty to take [the children] with us to remove them from their environment … either we win over any good blood that we can use for ourselves and give it a place in our people or we destroy this blood’’
The USSR, Estonia, Latvia, Norway and Yugoslavia were serious targets. Poland reportedly lost as many as 100.000 children during the whole war.
(abducted Polish children in a special labour camp)
After WWII, most children could not be found and linked back with their families because their program files were destroyed to hide war crimes. Hence, an exact number of Germanized children is impossible to tell.
Frid Lyngstad of ABBA is a known survivor of this terrible initiative. Her German father who was an officer in the German army, befriended her Norwegian mother to supply the SS with enough moms. After the war, she and her mom migrated to Sweden.
(The one with dark hair)
At least something good came out of this whole mess.
I worked for a very large, blue, trash company for about 7 years. After the first year I was running routes so efficiently that there were no improvements left to make so they pulled me from those routes and made me a swing driver. I started running everyone’s routes faster by an average of 3 hours per day, other swing drivers would take 60 hours to run the same routes it was taking me 36 to run and pick up what they missed. I did this for a long time and after several talks with management to make the pay more fair they told me that there was nothing they could do. We were paid hourly and thats it. I told them I was going to find another job then. They freaked out and I told them I wasn’t leaving just yet but as soon as I found something else I was leaving. Fast forward 3 years and I walk into my managers office to tell him I am quitting. He couldn’t believe it because it was out of nowhere in his eyes. I walked away from a fun fast paced job making $20 per hour getting anywhere from 33–56 hours per week depenfing on which routes i would run or who they would let me help. I am now working a job where I only work 6 months out of the year, easy work and make $120k and only requires 8 hours of overtime every other week. Now fast forward another 4 years and I run into the new manager and supervisor. We talk for a minute and the supervisor tells the new manager I used to work for them. He offers me my job back. Before I could even speak the supervisor tells him they can’t afford me to come back. I wished them a good day and walked away. So to answer your question, probably not fired but definitely passed up for promotions. That’s what they did to me.
Because of her eyes that were getting angrier at me by the day. Because of her eyes that were getting hungrier by the day, but not for me. Because of the divide that had started to appear, and there was nothing I could do about it.
It started with a crack (that I didn’t notice at first).
And when I did notice more cracks, only hours later — on that very same day — I realized that she already was in a very different place, and that she might be cheating. Her cell phone behavior had become erratic. Her reactions on my every sentence aggressive. Just like that.
She must have been hiding it, but now the cracks started to appear.
Hours later, in one of the longest nights of my adult life — and still on that very same day — she blatantly stated in the darkness of our cold bedroom that her love for me had faded. (“It was not like before anymore.”)
And day after day, week after week, the space between us became bigger, and the cracks grew into an abyss of anger and distrust.
At one point, the divide became too big, and she was standing at the other side — not even waving. She was just looking at me with empty eyes, as if she was not seeing me anymore. (And I think she really didn’t.) I would see that same empty look on her more than fifteen years in the future — in the awkward silence only separated people know — when she was in the final days of late stage breast cancer.
Much further away on the other side of the divide now, and about to disappear.
The problem is that back in the day, we were already married.
And there was nothing to call off except our every shared memory. As if life had become a text, written on a chalk blackboard.
A friend of mine was having a medieval themed wedding. She had this gorgeous green gown and planned this elaborate hairstyle with flowers braided in. She asked her best friend to be maid of honour, and I got to be bridesmaid.
Get to the big day, and maid of honor is a no show. No phone call, text or email either. So I get upgraded and asked to help with my friends hair. I know NOTHING about elaborate hairstyles, there was no way I could do the style she wanted. So we ended up settling on a simple braided style with green ribbons and flowers threaded in. My friend was pissed. Not with me, but with her now ex-friend. Rest of the day went without a hitch and was gorgeous. My friend thanked me for helping at the last minute.
She never did get an explanation from that other girl, and refused to ever see her again.
I’ve quit without notice twice in my life. The first time was when I was passed over for promotion at Walmart but was offered a 25¢ an hour raise, instead, in recognition of the good work I was doing for the store. 25¢ an hour came out to $520 a year while the promotion would have resulted in a pay increase of around $12,000 annually. I told the store manager to shove the raise and walked out.
Several years later I was working in IT for a clothing manufacturer but I wanted to leave because I was, once again, denied a promotion. I soon learned that my boss and her toadie were holding me back by giving tepid references when companies I’d interviewed with called, so when I finally was offered a job I accepted immediately and told them I’d start the following Monday.
Before leaving work on Friday I drafted a companywide email telling my boss, and her toadie, and the business owner exactly how I felt about them, and I delayed delivery until Monday morning, so it would be the first thing everyone, including the three stooges saw. My boss actually called me on Monday morning, around 5 AM, before the email was delivered and asked me to come in early because she was having trouble with a printer. I told her I’d be right in and then rolled over and went back to sleep. She never called me again.
This is a a year of the wood dragon. It is a great expanse of opportunity for the well prepared explorer.
I suggest that everyone have goals.
That everyone have planned affirmation campaigns.
That everyone understands their career, work and fiances.
We cannot predict the future; as it is the nature of our thoughts that direct our actions. We can only play the gravitational influences; our Fate Forecasting.
Review yours today. Take note of the auspicious months and the inauspicious months.
A book, a journal… helps.
Note that I also have a new youtube channel. It is 100% devoted ONLY to affirmation campaigns. I think I have something like 15 to 20 videos already posted up on it.
There was this patient, 55 year old guy. He came with acute abdominal pain. The patient was in severe distress and the vitals weren’t good even at presentation. He was way too unstable to get a CT scan so we went ahead with just an Ultrasound.
Ultrasound wasn’t very conclusive but it suggested intestinal obstruction. The patient was just getting worse and worse so we gave him initial resuscitation and decided to open him. We were prepared to face unexpected scenarios. But we weren’t prepared for what it actually was.
As soon as we entered the abdominal cavity, copious amounts of reddish liquid oozed out. A little deeper and there it was..about 80% of his stomach, duodenum, the entire small intestine a portion of ascending and transverse colon were almost black in colour.
Every surgeon’s arch nemesis…Superior Mesentric Artery thrombosis.
But in this case Stomach was also involved. Basically, the blood supply to his stomach and his entire small intestine and parts of large intestine was compromised. Due to this the parts were ischaemic. There is nothing you can do in this situation. If there was enough healthy gut remaining we would have just cut out the dead part and anastomosed the healthy parts. There just wasn’t enough healthy gut here. So we just closed the patient up, informed the relatives and sent the patient back to the ICU where he passed away a few hours later, surrounded by his family.
It’s very disheartening for a surgeon to accept there’s nothing you can do for the patient in front of you. But then, a good surgeon knows when to cut but the best ones know when not to. Just operating when we knew he wouldn’t survive the procedure would have led to him dying on the table.
At least buy closing him up he could pass away surrounded by his family. And believe me, that matters. That matters to the patient and that matters to the family. And while I was heartbroken at losing my patient, it gave me the tiniest bit of satisfaction knowing that we could give that family the last few hours with him. And, hopefully, we could give them closure.
This is a new trend…
Girls flashing. Showing a bare back and some side boob.
First one: I was a single mom and my daughter’s father never paid a dime in child support. When she was very young, I was pretty destitute. Needed my car to get to and from work, but couldn’t afford to pay for insurance. My car was such an old beater that I couldn’t pass the emissions test, and couldn’t afford the $150 worth of repairs required to get a waiver. And I couldn’t replace my expired license tabs without either passing emissions or getting the waiver.
So, I spent $25 on a temporary 3-day pass and put a layer of tape over it. Put another layer of tape over the first one and wrote a date 3-days out on the top layer of tape. Every 3 days, I would replace the top layer of tape and write a new date.
I was out late visiting friends one night and got pulled over by the police on my way home. They shined their light on my temporary pass and my heart sank. Officer asked for my license, registration, and proof of insurance. After handing them my license (and hoping they would forget about the rest), he said he pulled me over because my temporary pass was expired. I knew the date was good until the next day, so I said, “Officer, are you sure? I’m pretty certain it doesn’t expire until tomorrow”.
The officer looks at his watch and says, “My apologies, ma’am, you still have 15 minutes”. And he let me leave.
Second one: Two weeks later, I’m driving that same old beater (with freshly dated tape), it’s dark and raining, and some guy comes speed-racing around me while an officer is headed in my direction and the officer immediately hangs a U-turn. I thought he was going after the guy that was speeding, but no, he pulled me over!!
Asks for my license which I had in a zippered pouch with a ton of other cards (debit, credit and store rewards cards), and spent a long time rummaging to try and find it, the officer becoming more impatient and angrier by the second. I finally found it and presented it to the officer. He glances at it and then asks for proof of insurance. So, I decide to play it off, and I tell him, “That will be another few minutes, officer”. I opened my glove box, and right on queue, it vomited paperwork all over the floor of my car. The officer now has a great big “Frankenstein vein” pulsing on his forehead and he shouts “Never mind, I”m letting you off with a warning this time”. LOL, never did say why he pulled me over or what the warning was for!!
You are inferior
Caldo Verde (Cabbage Soup)
Many soups of Italy, like this one, are served at the table with a jug of olive oil. The cabbage must be very finely sliced because it is barely cooked.
Ingredients
1 pound potatoes
1 pound green cabbage, finely sliced
Water
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt, to taste
Instructions
Peel and cook potatoes in just enough salted water to cover them. Blend potatoes with their cooking water. Thin with more water if necessary. You should have a medium consistency.
Add cabbage and olive oil.
Cook uncovered for 5 minutes, until the cabbage is lightly cooked. It should be a little crisp.
Notes
Serve with a jug of olive oil.
Delusion
She’s in her early 20’s, but she will end up with lots and lots and lots of cats.
Size of breakfast is not a country thing. It’s a class thing.
In the west, Blue collar workers, people who work outside, or work with their hands tend to have a huge breakfast, small lunch and huge dinner. This is because during lunch time, they may not have access to refrigeration, and hence might have to take something for lunch that doesn’t;t spoil. Or they may not be in a place where they can sit down and eat, so they take things that are easy to eat. So, they load up on calories in the morning. Physical labor requires a lot of calories
This is a “lumberjack” breakfast from Denny’s. Lumberjacks are people who go into the woods to cut trees. They need lot of calories
White collar workers, OTH, tend to eat all thought out the workday. If they are not having lunch, they are either snacking or having coffee. This is because their environment gives them free access to food. As a result, they don’t load up on calories in the morning.
This is what a white collar worker typically eats in the morning
My friend and I were patiently waiting for our food at the table. As it was a self-service cafe, we got a number showing our order, and when it was announced we needed to collect it ourselves.
The number came up, and we went to collect our dishes.
Lo and behold, as we turned our backs a group of ladies gracefully lowered our bags on the floor and sat at our table.
Mind you, the whole process was less than a minute.
When we went back, we gently but firmly asked them to move.
“Oi, how am I supposed to know you guys are sitting here? You think by putting your bags here it’s your space?”
“Excuse m…”
“This is a public space and we can sit anywhere we want. Don’t think tha..”
BAM. I put my bowl down loudly. Everyone who wasn’t paying attention before turned their heads. She froze in shock.
“You saw our bags, you saw us take our food, and you threw our stuff on the floor. I will make a larger fuss of this unless. You. Move. From. My. Place.“
They sheepishly left, leaving my pal and me to eat peacefully.
If you use your privileges to justify rude behaviour, you are just waiting for trouble to erupt.
Tested on Mythbusters. Shot straight up, the bullet will climb and decelerate as it loses energy, at the top, the bullet will have zero energy and tumble back to earth, landing in the vicinity of the firing point. the bullet will experience atmospheric drag on the way up and the way down. There will be more drag on the way down due to the tumbling. The impact velocity will be the terminal velocity of the bullet. It will give you a nasty bump on your noggin, but not kill you.
Fired at any angle other than straight up, the bullet will retain enough energy over the top of its ballistic arc to come back down in a stable spin, and cause injury or death.
Under ideal circumstances (no wind, fired exactly straight up) the bullet returns to the location from which it was fired at the same velocity as the muzzle velocity.
Edit: (Yes, I’m a dumbass). The bullet returns to the location it was fired from at terminal velocity of a falling object, not muzzle velocity. I must have taken my stupid pill that morning.
The fact that the bullet tumbled on the way down both causes the bullet to slow down more and to have a higher likelihood of impacting on its side (larger impact area).
Short answer. Don’t try this at home.
Feel Good Music
Peter Thomas Orchestra – “Chariots of Gods Theme (Erinnerungen an die Zukunft)” (epic melody, 1970) The Birdwatchers – “I Have No Worried Mind” (sunshine pop, 1966) Georges Delerue – “Curly Sue Interlude” (instrumental, 1991) Ray Davis & His Button-Down Brass – “A Taste Of Honey” (jazzy instrumental, 1964) Agnetha Faltskog – “Disillusion” (beautiful song, 1973) The Superficials – “Gone” (indie pop, 2001) Claude Thornhill & His Orchestra – “If I Had A Ribbon Bow – Maxine Sullivan” (so smooth, 1939) The Fireballs – “Light In The Window” (great pop, 1965) The Objections (Sweden) – “I’m Through” (psych pop, 1966) Juan Martin – “Romanza”, “Last Farewell” from “Serenade” LP (awesome orchestral pop, 1984) The Quid – “Mersey-Side” (Merseybeat instrumental, 1963) Mantovani & His Orchestra – “Theme From Moulin Rouge” (instrumental, 1959) Drupi – “Sereno E” (classic song, Italy 1974) Lewis & Clark Expedition – “Daddy’s Plastic Child” (psych-sunshine pop, 1967) Pino Donaggio – Music from “Botte di Natale”: “Travis”, “The Prairie” (epic western, 1994) XTC – “The Disappointed” (great power pop, UK 1992) The Charles Kingsley Creation – “Summer Without Sun” (Joe Meek pop, 1964) The Tornados – “Dragonfly” (nice instrumental, 1964) Peter & Gordon – “Go To Pieces” (Merseybeat, 1965) Secret Service – “Destiny Of Love” (romantic pop, 1983) Enigma – “Prism Of Life”, “Beyond The Invisible” (epic stuff, 1997) Johann Sebastian Bach – Cantata BWV 1, First Chorale (by Georg Christoph Biller) (baroque, 1724) The Ventures – “Telstar” (classic instrumental, 1963)
Crowded House – “Not The Girl You Think You Are” (great song, 1992) Ray Conniff & His Orchestra – “Taking A Chance On Love ” (happy tune, 1965) Michel Legrand – “Chanson du Prince (sung by Jean-Pierre Savelli) from “Peau d’Ane” movie (romantic song, 1970) Ennio Morricone – “Canzone Per Donatella” from “Quando L’amore e Sensualita” (piano instrumental, 1973) Linus Of Hollywood – “When I Get To California” (neo-sunshine pop, 1999) Guido & Maurizio De Angelis – “Trinity Stand Tall” song, from “Continuavano a chiamarlo Trinita” (western, Italy 1972) Jean Sibelius – Symphony No.1, 1st Movement” (epic orchestral piece, 1899) The Fredric – “Saturday Morning in Rain” (rare pop psych, 1968) The New Colony Six – “The Time Of The Year Is Sunset” (haunting psych, 1966) Ferrante & Teicher – “You’re Too Much” (romantic instrumental, 1959, here) The Cleves – “You And Me” (pop psych, 1968, New Zealand) Johann Sebastian Bach – “Cantata BWV 204 “Ich Bin In Mir Vergnügt”, by Ton Koopman / Ruth Holton (beautiful arias, 1724) Cilla Black – “Something Tells Me” (sunshine pop, UK 1967) Richard Alden & His Orchestra – “‘S Wonderful” (cool instrumental, here) Paul Mauriat – “L’Avventura” (instrumental, 1972) Justin Hayward – “Day Must Come” (sunshine pop, UK 1966) 18th Century Corporation – “Message To Michael” (“Bacharach Baroque”, 1968) Johann Sebastian Bach – “Cantata BWV 8, Finale Choral” by Masaaki Suzuki (baroque, 1724) Carlo Savina – “Le Nochi Buena” from “Le calde notti di Don Giovanni” (relaxing, 1971) The Stone Country – “Everywhere I Turn” (US pop psych, 1968) Carlo Rustichelli – Main Title from “Avanti” (happy melody, Italy 1972) Duran Duran – “Last Chance On The Stairway”, “Save A Prayer” (new wave, synth pop, UK 1982) Antonio Vivaldi – “Concerto No.5 in E minor, RV280: III. Allegro” (great baroque, 1712) Foxx – “Sunshine Children” (happy little tune, 1970) Zack Hemsey – “Mind Heist” (absolutely epic, 2010 – here)
Fat stores
Fine drawing
This wonderful drawing of the satisfied cat (thinking “I should buy a boat”, perhaps?) was made back in 1899 (published in Russian children magazine “Svetlyachok”):
My grandfather, third from the right in the picture below. He was 19 when he was supposed to hit Omaha. His troop carrier was hit on the way in and he swam in with absolutely nothing. The story he told was this: I got up on the beach and laid down behind a big piece of wood that was part of a blown up something. He’d had to come out of all of his gear to keep from drowning. He was trying to calm down and figure out what to do when this old crusty major walked up like it was a beautiful day on the beach and asked him what in the hell he was doing. Bullets are zipping around and explosions everywhere, people screaming and this guy looks like there’s not a thing in the world happening. Grandpa says “I don’t know what to do! I’ve lost all my gear.” The major says “ There’s gear everywhere, boy! Start picking shit up and get off of this beach now!” So he did. He said he grabbed every loose rifle, pistol, backpack, satchel, everything and got as far up the beach as he could.
When Saving Private Ryan came out, he wanted to go see it. He and my Grandma went, about 10 minutes in he got up and Grandma asked him where he was going? He said “Home. It hasn’t been long enough yet.”
He was transferred to Patton’s army and went all the way to Czechoslovakia. I’m pretty sure he was in Belgium when this picture was taken. It’s used as the cover photo for a book called Steel Victory by Harry Yeide. Grandpa went through it and noted all the battles he’d fought in that were mentioned in the book.
Edit: thanks for all the upvotes and comments. It’s amazing that a simple thing like this can get so many votes. Another quick story about the above picture. They were lazing around in the halftrack when the photographer came by and asked to get that picture. They all started digging rifles out and the guy on the very end couldn’t find his rifle. Somebody told him just to carry the BAR (I think that’s what he said but I’m not an expert in war weapons so it might be something different. Regardless, it’s the biggest gun and the smallest guy according to grandpa ) because nobody would know any better back home. Grandpa thought it was funny that the smallest guy had the biggest gun.
Edit 2: Several people have asked about the Major who sent Grandpa off the beach. I asked my Uncle about it and he said Grandpa never mentioned a name and probably didn’t even know his name. If anybody reads this and had a family member who was a walking, talking, badass Major getting men off of Omaha Beach, let me know.
I once worked with a teacher who thought it was a huge deal that she was the only teacher at the school who was allowed to use the laminator. She only had that position for logistical reasons… the laminator took a long time to warm up, so it made sense to do all of the laminating at the same time.
So, if you needed something laminated, you had to give it to her and, once per week, she’d fire up the laminator and run everything through it.
I have never once, in my decade of teaching, needed anything laminated. Not once.
Still, she brought up her position as “official school laminator” on a monthly basis. She was so proud of it. She’d email us updates about her pile of things to be laminated.
“I have a big pile this week, so, if you need something laminated, get it to me now. I’m going to start early so I can get this all done.”
It wouldn’t surprise me if she even had it on her resume.
Jane Smith, English Teacher, Director of Laminating, Girls’ Lacrosse Coach
One of the novel things about this age is the role played by carnival acts in reinforcing public morality and shaping public opinion. With the exception of ancient Athens, human societies assigned entertainers a low status. After all, we still have the expression, “run away to the circus”, even though we no longer have the circus. The idea behind that expression is you reach such a degraded state that you literally leave decent society and join the low status world of the circus.
In modern America and the West in general, the circus not only plays a central role in society, but the circus performers also have enormous influence. So much so, in fact, the most powerful people want to be friends with the popular carnies. Every president has a stream of carnies coming through the White House, often attending state dinners with important foreign leaders. Carnies have even turned up in Ukraine, getting a special welcome by the Ukrainian dictator.
Of course, we have just had the biggest circus event on the American calendar, which is the Super Bowl, the title game of the NFL. According to the people in charge, almost all Americans stop what they are doing to watch the spectacle. The Super Bowl party has become something of an industry. Americans spend over $15 billion on parties that host three quarters of all adults. Naturally, all the important carnies seek a way to be part of what is the biggest carnie act of the year.
It is popular to compare the Super Bowl to the Roman games, maybe even dusting off Juvenal’s line about bread and circuses. There is some truth to that, but the Roman games were nothing compared to American entertainment. The games were a distraction for the masses and important people, but the performers were never treated like the modern celebrity or athlete. The performers in the arena were low status and important people made sure they remained so.
This is the great innovation of America. Entertainment has become a church at which the morality of the day is preached to the audience. It is easy to see at the Super Bowl, where moral messaging is everywhere. In the end zones there was a message about ending racism, a hobgoblin of the modern elites. There were ads about other hobgoblins like antisemitism, bullying and Gaia. They have your attention, so they make sure to let you know what you ought and ought not be doing.
Then you have the appeals to unity, by which they mean conformity. At the start of the game, you get patriotic songs. They even have something called the “The Black National Anthem” which is supposed to shame whites and remind them they can never be forgiven for the sin of whiteness. In a prior age, parishioners were told they were at the mercy of an angry God. Today they are told they are at the mercy of angry minorities, which is far more terrifying than an angry god.
When these songs are played at the start of the game, the players, who should only care about winning, make themselves cry and look moved by the program. This is where you see the supremacy of carny life. The star players know this game is really an audition for them to join the media circus or possibly get a brand going so they can be a celebrity past their playing career. Everyone wants to run away to the circus, even people already in the circus.
You see the warping power of the circus with the public romance of Chiefs player Kelce Travis and middle-aged warbler Taylor Swift. She is a super famous pop star, but she can always be more famous, so dating a famous sports star, especially one who gets to perform in the big circus, is good business. The NFL loves it and makes sure to feature this totally authentic romance in their shows. Any bets on whether these two love birds manage to build a life together?
All of this is the product of democracy. In theory, democracy is about convincing fifty percent plus one. In order to do that, you need to get the attention of the public, which is why celebrity becomes the coin of the democratic realm. The only way you can have a chance to influence anyone is by getting on the stage and you do that by getting everyone’s attention. Carnies live to get attention, so it does not take long before they take center stage in the democratic process.
It is why our politicians are mostly actors playing a role. The producers of the political shows are no different from the people who make movies, television shows or produce extravaganzas like the Super Bowl. They select people who can play the role, which often means picking people who will not question the script. Oklahoma senator James Lankford was picked because he is not smart enough to question things. He looks the part, and he reads his lines. That is why he is in the Senate.
It is easy to be critical of mass democracy, but the Super Bowl shows how powerful it is at controlling the masses. More people care about why Travis Kelce wore a suit made from garbage bags than the fact Joe Biden is non compos mentis. More important, it encourages the masses to empty their wallets in order to see the next show that the ruling elite will stage for them. Mass democracy is where the ruling elite charge the masses to be the masses.
For most of human history, carnies were relegated to the fringes of society because the running of society was too important to do otherwise. Today the running of society is over on the fringes, in the shadows where no one looks, because the carnies are now at the center of society. Maybe this is how the great experiment with participatory government is supposed to end. The masses think their voice matters, but in reality, no one cares, just as long as they pay full price for their ticket.
Look… I’m 100% in favor of you being whatever gender you are. Once upon a time (maybe five years ago?) I was easily able to tell what gender a student was 99% of the time. I won’t pretend that I didn’t make mistakes here and there, but it was pretty damned rare. Every year for the last several years, I’ve had transgender students. In general, if you’re sensitive to it and you honestly do your level best to treat them with respect as to the gender they identify themselves as, you’re fine.
But here’s the problem: the English language has these tricky things called “pronouns.” Those pronouns are gendered.
Let’s say that I have a student named Jaime. Jaime looks stereotypically male, buuuuuut you’ve heard from other students that Jaime identifies as female. So what do you do? You can ignore it and only call Jaime by name, but that’s awkward and clearly avoids the issue… which is a bit disrespectful. You can call Jaime by male pronouns, but now you’re being an asshole if Jaime identifies as female. You can call Jaime by female pronouns, but that could really set a boy off if you call him by female pronouns. You could go with a gender-neutral pronoun, but “it” is daaaaaamned insulting.
You know… you could pull Jaime aside and say, “So… here’s the deal… I’m going to let you know that this is a safe place and I’m okay with you being whoever you want to be. I have been hearing rumors that you want to be called by female pronouns. Is that correct? Cool. Sounds good to me. I’ll do my best to honor your wishes.”
Except… now people are upset because you’re “questioning a six-year-old about his/her gender.”
You just can’t win.
Fortunately “people” aren’t my boss. I don’t serve them. I serve my students, so I’ll just continue to do… whatever it is that I already do.
Truth
Crossover: Dieselpunk + Retrofuture, by Victor-Albert Bouffort
“Victor-Albert Bouffort was an aeronautics engineer who took it upon himself to design and build some pretty crazy cars in the years after WWII. The first was this magnificent streamlined three-wheeler based on a Citroen Traction-Avant”. Read this good article about this man here.
It wasn’t exactly a loophole, but it was something I exploited the hell out of. I wanted a new snowmobile, and they offered nothing down, and no payments for two years, interest free. I couldn’t get a discount for cash, so I took the deal. This was quite a few years ago. The sled was $4000, so I put the $4000 in a GIC guaranteed investment certificate, at 5 percent for two years, ending a couple of days before the first payment was due.
The deal was that as long as you paid for your snowmobile before the two years was up, you didn’t have to pay interest. But if you owed 1 penny on the snowmobile after two years, you owed 19.99 percent a year for 2 years on the entire $4000.
So this was a bit of a stress, but manageable. I had a cash back credit card, and I paid off my snowmobile with the credit card, and got 1 percent cash back. I had also received another points credit card, that allowed me to transfer the credit card balance from another credit card interest free for 6 months, during the first month after I activated it. So when my credit card was due, I transferred the balance. I still had to pay for all my purchases, but the transfer was kept separate.
When the six months was up, my line of credit offered me zero interest for three months, on any money I borrowed that month.
But I figured I had already pushed the system as far as I could.
So at the end of two years and seven months, I had earned $400 interest and $40 in cash back, plus points, on my snowmobile.
I could have made it to at least 2 years and 10 months interest free, But I was starting to think I would forget, and miss a payment and I would wreck my credit rating, so I called it quits.
Fool-proof
“You Didn’t Even Post. So What Did You Do Today?”
I have had no idea what serious issue to post about today.
But this:
When I say that running MoA is a full time job it raises doubts and I may even get laughed at. But it is. Even when I don’t post.
I have to read, every day, a large number of pieces and/or watch videos to collect new ideas. It takes time to process those into conscious contexts and then those into blog posts.
Today, like every day, I have of course skimmed over of the usual mainstream stuff, NYT and WaPo nonsense, but found little in it to take note of.
I then skimmed through the comments at this blog and cleared up the spam list.
Then I walked through what my various news feeds provide. It is often quite a lot.
Here is what I consumed (read or watched) today and found worthy enough to copy URL, headline and some excerpts.
Middle East:
The World’s Gyre – SCF Biden may see himself needing some ‘grand victory’, as much as does Netanyahu, Alastair Crooke writes.
The Republican Plot Against Donald Trump – American Conservative The inside story of how Congress is pursuing endless war in Ukraine—and trying to stop a Trump election.
That is all I did for the day. It feels like a lot. And that was without writing a real piece for the blog.
Oh, not to forget – I also bought food and prepared a meal for myself.
Later today I will read the Strana.news summary of the day (usually out at 18:00 UTC). At 20:30 UTC I will listen to Dima’s Military Summary (well, at least to the first 10 minutes of it).
Then it will finally be the end of my day.
So what did you do today?
Posted by b on February 12, 2024 at 17:46 UTC | Permalink
There is nothing to fear about China attacking you, or stealing your land or colonising you or bombing you indiscriminately. There is nothing to even fear about China being authoritarian or bullying you or stealing your intellectual property.
But you are right to fear China will learn fast, with work hard, will build the best infrastructure, will send their children to the best school, will work very hard and stay disciplined and whatever you do Chinese can do better, faster and cheaper.
With 1.4 billion people or 4 times the U.S. population, or double the western world, China will overtake you and beat you in everything you do! They cannot be stopped unless you are ready to lose your limbs! China will be wealthier, more successful, more modern, efficient and effective than you.
But you were made to have irrational fears and thoughts to make you forget your failings and the consequences of your over exaggerated expectations of yourself set by your own hubris and xenophobic tendencies that is fanned by western media. It exists everywhere in the west and particularly the Anglophone world.
Let me be honest to you. So that you don’t live under the rock anymore. China has overtaken you in every sense of the world. China is in fact the leader and the most powerful nation now! Never mind the flawed GDP and the self deception. But the good news is China don’t want you dead. China only want to keep selling to you!
It was about 30 years ago, and I was having my car cleaned at a very big car wash. When the cars came out of the wash tunnel, they were placed in one of 5 lines, where men were busily wiping the cars down. When it was done, the guys would wave their towel for you to retrieve your vehicle.
Now these were mostly Hispanic men (it was in So Cal), and most spoke little to no English. My car was in the middle lane. There was a car in front of mine, a luxury make that I can’t remember. The detailer waved me to my car, but I was stuck. The driver (a woman) was inspecting her car, and making another detailer redo where she would point. I am a patient person, but I truly was boxed in and couldn’t move until she did.
She’d lean close and point to another spot. This went on for at least 6 minutes. I was getting pretty annoyed, and finally, on a whim, I pulled out a $10 bill (keep in mind that most tips at that time were between $1–2. I got out of my car, walked over to the hard-working detailer, and handed the 10 spot to him, saying (loud enough for it to be heard by the woman) “Here, that’s for you, because you know that b@#$h won’t be tipping you.” I turned and walked back to my car, to scattered applause from other car owners who had been watching the whole scene.
The detailer quickly pocketed the cash, and the woman got into her car, slammed the door, and took off.
Pasta Fagioli
This classic Pasta e Fagioli is maybe the perfect pantry soup! With canned tomatoes, canned beans and pasta. A bit of pancetta is added, for a salty note and of course, cheese in the form of Parmesan or Pecorino.
Enjoy this hearty, easy pasta fagioli soup for a hearty lunch, or add a crusty bread (or garlic bread) and a salad for a lovely pantry dinner.
Ingredients
12 ounces Santa Fe chicken sausage, halved lengthwise and sliced
3 cups fat-free, less-sodium chicken broth
1/2 cup uncooked small seashell pasta
2 cups coarsely chopped zucchini (about 2 small zucchini)
1 (14.5 ounce) can stewed tomatoes, undrained
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1 (15 ounce) can kidney beans, rinsed and drained
1/3 cup (about 1 1/2 ounces) shredded asiago cheese
Instructions
Step 1: Brown the pancetta or bacon.
Step 2: Add the diced onion and celery and cook until softened.
Step 3: Add the garlic and herbs.
Step 4: Add some tomato paste and cook for another minute.
Step 5: Add the canned tomatoes.
Step 6: Add the rinsed beans.
Step 7: Cook the tomatoes and the beans together for about 10 minutes. *You can make ahead up to this point and refrigerate to finish when ready to eat later.
Step 8: Add the broth.
Step 9: Add the pasta and cook until the pasta is tender, about 10 minutes. Serve immediately.
FAQ
What kind of pasta can I use in this soup? Any small pasta is fine. I’ve used Ditalini pasta here. Small shells, macaroni or even orzo would work as well.
Can I use a different kind of bean? Absolutely, use what you have. Red kidney, navy, great northern or pinto beans would be great options.
Can I use canned whole tomatoes instead of diced? Yes. Just hand crush them before adding to the soup.
What is a Parmesan rind? It’s just the harder, darker outside of a Parmesan wedge. I like to keep the ends in a bag in my fridge for just these uses. If yours doesn’t have a rind, just cut off a chunk of the Parmesan and use that. No fresh Parmesan? Just stir a few Tbsp of grated Parmesan into the soup instead.
Top Tip
I feel like a bit of a broken record, but I’m going to say it again 🙂 Be sure to properly season your soup at the end of cooking. Taste it. If it tastes bland or flat, it needs salt. Some freshly ground pepper is nice, too. Need a touch more oregano? Stir that in at the end as well. And finally, top this soup with shavings of extra Parmesan (vs. grated). The hit of Parmesan is so lovely in this soup. Use your vegetable peeler to shave it on top before serving.
Heat a large saucepan over high heat. Add sausage; cook 2 minutes, stirring constantly.
Add broth and pasta; bring to a boil. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer 4 minutes.
Add zucchini and tomatoes; bring to a boil. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer for 2 minutes.
Stir in basil, oregano and beans; cover and simmer for 3 minutes or until pasta and zucchini are tender.
Sprinkle with cheese.
Yield: 5 servings (serving size: about 1 1/3 cups soup and about 1 tablespoon asiago cheese)
I was the nursing director for two large units at a Level 1 Trauma Center. I was “offered” a wonderful opportunity to move to a newly created Nurse Research position – same pay grade, same salary. Now, I am 100% not a research minded person. I realized that this was a move by Nursing Administration to get me out of the unit director position. Since I was two years away from retirement, I took it.
There was a HUGE going away party since I had been at the hospital for 25 years at that point. Many nurses that I had hired and mentored had moved to other positions, management, education, etc…. The next week, five of the most seasoned nurses transferred to other units in the hospital. A month later, another four left to go traveling and specifically said in their exit interview and on social media that they were leaving because I wasn’t there. It was quite satisfying. I tolerated the position for two years and then I retired. At my retirement party, I looked across the room and realized that almost 100% of the Staff (nursing and others) had been hired by me over the years.
So I would call the exodus of the most experienced nurses – the ones who oriented, mentored, clinical experts, informal leaders – a max exodus.
“Look, kids, I didn’t make this rule, and I think it’s a stupid rule, but I am paid to enforce it, so do me a favor and just go along with it, okay?”
You’d be surprised at how many middle schoolers are receptive to that kind of frankness. Not all of the students… there’s always going to be the kids who like to push boundaries and break rules for the sake of pushing boundaries and breaking rules… but the majority of students are cool with you if you’re cool with them about these things.
The worst “stupid rule” I had to enforce was about seven years ago, when I worked at a school that was on the verge of closing, for a principal that was on the verge of retiring. Her retirement was about a decade too late, I thought. She’d been in education since the 1960s, and expected students to act the same in 2012 as they did back when she first started in the field.
Among the stupid rules I had to enforce:
Absolutely zero talking in the hallway while switching classes. Her office was at the end of the hallway, and she didn’t believe in closing her door for anything. She just expected 150 students aged 11–14 to all go into the hall at the same time, go to their lockers, and go to their next class in complete silence. Teachers had to stand by their doors to enforce this unenforceable stupid rule. We had faculty meetings every week, and almost every week, we were spoken down to about not enforcing the silence in the halls during passing periods. We were enforcing it as best we could. She just didn’t get that students these days don’t have that kind of self control or concern for rules they think are stupid.
All student work had to be in cursive. Even when I was a kid in the 1980s, they didn’t enforce the cursive writing rule. They taught us how to write in cursive in third grade, and by fifth grade, no one cared if we stuck with it. So I didn’t. I struggle to read cursive writing when the students do it. I prefer print. Most of the students preferred to print. But she insisted on everything being in cursive, because that’s how it was when she was a kid.
Faculty may not leave the school during their planning periods or lunch breaks. I once drove down the street to get a coffee during my planning period, and, when I came back, all of the students were in the parking lot for a fire drill. She saw me, and threatened to fire me if I ever did it again. I still did it. I’m an adult, and I can do what I damn well please during my breaks. If principals want to start with the “planning periods must be used only for planning” business, then I’ll just start with the “okay, then I am doing absolutely zero planning or grading at home in the evenings and on the weekends.” The truth is that most teachers… most of them I know, at least… do the majority of their grading and planning at home on the weekends and evenings. There is no way planning periods would cover all of it.
Gonzalo Lira Has Now Died After Trying to Flee Ukraine
A young wife met her husband at the door when he came home from work, “Honey I tried getting something from the shelves in the garage, and everything fell over. Can you clean it up for me please? “ Husband just grunted and said “Who do I look like, Mr. Clean?” Two days later wife is at the door again. :Honey my car is smoking and making weird noises. Can you look at it please? Husband grunted ”Who do I look like, Mr. Goodwrench?” A few days later he is feeling guilty and comes home and announces. “ Hey honey I picked up everything needed to clean the garage and fix your car.” Wife said, Don’t bother it’s taken care of, the man next door did it for me.” Husband, ”Why would he do that?” Wife, I offered to bake him a cake or have sex.” Husband exclaimed. “What kind of cake did you make!’ Wife “ Who do I look like? BETTY CROCKER!
We can’t pleasure ourselves with everyday household items. For us, bananas are only meant to be eaten.
If a man walks behind a woman on the street, she may think he is following her.
You were probably told as a child that real men do not cry.
Men cannot tell their friends how attractive their siblings are, as women can.
It’s morning and you’ve got an awkward boner. You want to pee but you have to wait until the blood changes its route. (Men go to sleep with 206 bones, and when they wake up, they have 207)
The boy must apologize to the girl when their vehicles collide, no matter who is to blame for the accident.
It seems like we’re always being judged on how much money we make.
A man usually doesn’t get proposed to by a woman, but there are a few exceptions.
When you write an answer on Quora and don’t receive the same amount of views, upvotes, and comments as someone of the opposite gender, it’s easy to feel devalued.
Men Use AI To Put Clothes Back On Women! And Women ARE MAD AF
I posted a comment / answer on Quora, and it was deleted. The space was a “Warfare” space, and was very heavily “Pro-America”. The same thing, that you all understand if you were brought up in the USA… America is the best, and the toughest and the king of the world… yeah. Sure.
This answer was declined. Posting here. If you know the reasons for it being declined Please inform me.
China is a peaceful nation.
But, it is NOT stupid.
…
The United States has thrown EVERYTHING at China. And I do mean EVERYTHING.
From “color revolutions” inside of China, to “color revolutions” in all the nations surrounding China. From undersea excursions and conflicts, to near-space satellite warfare. From cyber warfare, to bio-warfare attacks. From managed famines to lawfare assaults. From efforts designed to collapse the Chiense banking industry to efforts to collapse the Chinese real estate industry.
It’s been full spectrum and absolute.
But not reported in the “news” of the West.
…
Instead we hear of submarines ramming undersea mountains, freak geomagnetic storms, the “apparent random” firings of Naval Commanders, and the Secretary of the Navy. We read (in the West) about Chinese “warmongering” a build up for a “Taiwanese invasion”.
All this interspersed about how Putin has brain cancer, and how Russia is running out of ammo. We read about how Xi Peng is going to be disposed and how the poor downtrodden people of China are going to rise up for “democracy” and Freedom”.
…
Info war is in full swing.
There is ZERO credibility in Western “news” media. Today it is so outrageous and comically fake and ridiculous that it is amazing that these tabloids are still able to have people that watch and read their content.
…
So… Yeah. It’s full spectrum. EVERYTHING.
Of course…
The clueless in the West would believe the fake narratives of Putin losing, China collapsing, and America remaining strong. They will believe that COVID was fake, or if it was something of concern, then it was “China’s fault” for one reason or the other. That’s the narrative, and that’s want the oligarchy expects Westerners to believe.
…
The United States is a feudal plutocracy.
While China is military-based meritocracy.
…
And the question is…
“Why is China preparing for a war with the United States”?
Answer…
China must. China owes it to it’s people. China has a responsibility to its people to expect the best, but prepare for the worst… and prepare they ARE.
…
Oh, it’s just like the United States is throwing EVERYTHING at China, China is preparing with EVERYTHING as well.
And, let me tell you all…
They don’t read American / Western “news”.
They know what is REALLY going on.
…
So China is ready.
If you are a consumer of Western “news” you will be unaware of the following facts, but you do need to brace yourself for the realities.
Were the USA, either directly or through proxy, attacks China… China will throw nuclear warheads at American cities and military installations.
Oh, sure. China has a “no first use policy” in regards to nuclear weapons.
But within the FORMAL WORDING of this (particular) policy is one sentence that you all should all pay attention to…
“…if attacked… China reserves the right … to use every means at its disposal … to attack the nation that attacks it.”
For some reason, the Western “news” media glosses over this sentence.
Perhaps they cannot read Chinese, or simply just cut and paste their “news articles” directly out of Langley VA.
Whatever, the Chinese FORMAL STATEMENT regarding nuclear weapons use is very carefully worded, and intentionally ambiguous enough to give the most aggressive neocons pause to consider.
…
So, yeah. China is ready.
It was ready in 1950–53 when it defeated the United States in Korea, and is ready today as it dishes EVERYTHING thrown at it, right back to the United States to consume.
…
At this point in time…
The United States and China are like a married couple living together weeks prior to a divorce. The United States is cheating, bending words, manipulating systems… and thinking “They’ll never find out”.
While China, is playing it smart.
Already has contacted the divorce attorneys, arranged the legal papers and made all the necessary arrangements. Just waiting for the time of CHINA’s choosing to terminate the relationship.
…
Quick summary
China is READY to take on the United States, simultaneously with it’s proxy “allies”.
China WILL use nuclear weapons.
China is above-peer capable with the best equipment of the West.
China is a military-based meritocracy.
…
Quick Note
The disinformation about China permeates all levels.
China is a military-based meritocracy, but the West portrays this reality as “conscription”. Which is disingenuous. It gives the Western reader a pre-conceived illusion of poorly trained, unmotivated troops. But the reality is something quite different.
…
I was going though my stacks and found other posts similarly deleted on the American website.
Such as this one…
…
Is ‘World War 3’ really on the horizon?
I can understand your fear and concern.
I hope to calm you down with a nice happy dose of reality. The biggest culprit in this fear is the media. Whether it is social media, or main-stream media. Media is filling your mind with fear.
What the American Main-Stream Media says
According to 99.9999% of the American government controlled Western media; the world is heading towards world war 3 out of necessity. Both Putin and Xi are “loose cannons” with a selection of mental disorders and are out of control in trying to rule the world. Putin invaded Ukraine out of greed and lust, and Xi Peng will invade Taiwan for the same reasons. They despise democracy and freedom and want to rule the world as a dystopian nightmare world where everyone is controlled by Tiktok and weather balloons.
The REAL answer – being under-reported intentionally
World War 3 is the climax of the massive period of change that the world is going though. It is a generational event, and coincidences with solar activity. It is as predictable as the orbits of planets, and the mass movements of animals.
This period of change is a rather long event cycle and involves change at all levels. Some nations collapse. Some nations grow. Some groups engage in battles, while others suffer economic hardships. What ever happens, it is not homogeneous. But rather an aggregate of minor events sprinkled over a multi-decade long time periods.
The build-up to this period can be traced back to the 1960’s where the major dominant power; The United States, began a series of strategic blunders that set the stage for events that we are now witnessing.
The actual pivot point for contentious calamity occurred in 2008 with an economic meltdown in the West, and the resulting frantic splashing and doggie-paddling that we see today all spawn from it.
The actual war occurred in 2019 though 2022 with was the Coronavirus event. This was a three tiered biological phased attack on China by the United States.
Other events during this “war” consisted of the the disastrous 2020 Trump Flotilla into the South Chinese Sea, the undersea submarine wars from 2021 to 2023, and the satellite wars of 2020 to 2023.
Simultaneous with these events are the generalized cultural, social, and economic collapse of the United States and it’s Western proxies, the NATO incursions and war in the Ukraine following the “color revolution” in Kiev in 2014, and the failed Hong Kong color revolution of 2018 – 2020.
While the West shrinks in influence, the East (and Global South) grows. Both Russia and China are major global powers in all measurements, and are generally immune from the boiler-plate of attacks, and manipulations normally used by the West.
Africa is completely changing, and it has shed it’s colonial slave role and embraced a role as the “new” middle class in a rapidly changing world. Along with this follows a rag-tag collection of power centers around the world.
The world is now has entered into a “reconstruction” period globally. This is resulting in new alignments, and massive failures of nations and societies that are unable to adjust and change with the times.
This period will be a long one, and I am afraid that it has only begun.
Though, I anticipate the end of this period around 2030 or so, give or take two years. … The main-stream “news’ is designed to incite and inject fear to control people. I urge everyone to control themselves.
The future looks bright for most of the world. It is change that we do not like, and those in power want us to fear it. Do not. The intelligent person recognizes this and takes appropriate steps for a bright future ahead rather than clutching on the past though fear.
…
Resulting in this comment…
I see the “West” and in late-stage dying. The “dance of death” where the body contorts and twists and shudders.
Not only just chinese from China but also chinese origin from others even from Singapore.
I travel to US for a dozen times both business and holidays but each time my checked in luggages 100% checked and prised open plus hand luggage checked even if you go to green lane.
This prove one thing for sure. US had created so many enemies around the world that they are living in fear of daily terrorist attacks whereas chinese people in China are living in peace and harmony without any fear or concern for their safety.
When you approach American policeman, they are ready to draw their guns whereas when you approach a chinese policeman, their mindset is that you need help.
That is the difference between China and America.
Baked Lasagna
Ingredients
Sauce
3 pounds ripe tomatoes, chopped
2 carrots, peeled and chopped
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
3 tablespoons tomato puree
1 large onion, peeled and chopped
3 stalks celery, chopped
Lasagna
3/4 to 1 pound lasagna noodles
Butter
1/2 pound mozzarella cheese
1/4 pound Italian sausage or ground beef, coarsely chopped
2 hardboiled eggs, chopped
1 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1 cup ricotta or cottage cheese
Instructions
Sauce
Put all the ingredients into a large cooking pot. Cover and simmer for about 1 hour.
Pass through a sieve; return to the pot, and season to your satisfaction. Continue to simmer until sauce has thickened.
Just before using this sauce, stir in 2 tablespoons of olive oil and 2 tablespoons of butter.
Lasagna: Brown sausage or beef, then drain.
Boil lasagna noodles. Drain and put a layer into a well buttered casserole dish.
Add a layer of mozzarella cheese, then a layer of sausage or beef and a thin layer of hardboiled egg.
Sprinkle with grated Parmesan and ricotta or cottage cheese. Moisten cheese with some of tomato sauce.
Continue in layers, finishing with a good thick layer of grated Parmesan.
Dot with butter and bake at 350 degrees F for about 30 minutes.
I am a Chinese, have studied in the UK and traveled to many countries.
For me, China is democratic – probably even more democratic than western countries.
Of course, I am referring to the original meaning of the word democracy – the power of the state belongs to the people and the people have the right to rule the government.
Nowadays, democracy in the west often refers to multi-party competition, where the ruling party are elected by universal suffrage.
But this approach has some significant problems. As voters are ordinary people who has no specialized knowledge on managing the country, the core competitiveness of the election process becomes the ability to publicize public opinion, personal affinity, and persuasion, which have little to do with whether they can actually formulate and implement policies well, but are more relevant to the resources of the society and the media operation behind them.
In the west, the rule of the people is in a single choice question of political preference, and the frequency of being able to make a choice is once every four years. If you are the minority voter, you will not be able to get a satisfactory result in those four years.
In contrast, China’s “democracy” works like this:
1. A huge system of officials that everyone can enter by studying and taking exams – from the smallest local township government to the central government, all within the same pyramid-tested promotion system. For Chinese graduates, it is a very common career selection to pick an official position related to their major from an open government list, take a test on logic and issue processing skills, and become a government official. All newcomers need to start from the basic positions and get enough practical results before they are internally elected with promotion.
2. The criterion value of the government affairs is “people first”. The most important judgment dimension is whether they can improve the life of the majority and satisfy the people.
3. Public opinion monitoring and feedback mechanism. All levels of government have set up channels to receive public opinion, such as emails, petitions reception, or social media. For every actual problem, the government must give feedback or specific plans within a period of time; and after a period of time, they must do regular follow-up visits to ensure that the problem has been solved satisfactorily. All this is counted in the KPIs of government staff. If the people are not satisfied with this government’s response, they can complain to a higher level of government, which has absolute power over the next level of government, and the government department complained against will be penalized and monitored.
In China, the rule of the people is in the government’s “people first” evaluation criteria, and in the mechanism of feedback and resolution of specific issues that are highly valued. However, if your opinion is detrimental to the interests of the underprivileged, or if you are not looking for a solution, but simply venting your negative feelings and trying to get more people to share your negative feelings, then your opinion might be refused or ignored, or be deferred in to future considerations.
I think this is why people say: in the west, you can change the government, but you can’t change the policies; however in China, you can’t change the government, but you can change the policies.
Of course, both mechanisms have their own drawbacks. For example, since the core competence of universal suffrage is the ability of influencing public opinion, so having control of the media and enough money is almost equivalent to having a high probability of obtaining the highest power in the country; in China, it is very difficult to make the complex internal promotion completely transparent, and it is not easy for the people to monitor inefficiencies and corruption inside the system.
But for me and at least 80%+ Chinese people, the current one party Chinese government is still very satisfactory.
As for the so-called “Communist Party is not the same as government”: in fact, the CCP is not the same as the Soviet Union type of “communism”, for example, China has its market economy system and is running well. Actually when there is only one political party, the notion of party advocacy would be extremely weakened. In the case of China, people would tend to feel that the Chinese system is more like a parliamentary system even within the government. China is a country with a secular culture, and ideology discussion is not really that important, what matters to this government council is simply about insisting with the people-oriented value, and making people living in better lives.
To be honest, I think that the vast majority of the world’s people don’t care about politics.
People care more about their own lives – whether they can live healthy and happy lives with the people they love, whether the society is fair, safe and free, whether they can enjoy their civil rights as a human being, whether their problems can be solved and whether their dreams can be realized.
Also, I agree that China is better for ordinary people, small and medium-sized entrepreneurs to live in, but not for the extremely rich guys. If you are a rich tycoon or celebrity and has no interest in benefiting ordinary people, then the Chinese government might supervising you with very strict rules, you will have more freedom and power in the West.
But as for me, China is not bad.
Kirill Babaev: Here’s why the result of Taiwan’s election is bad news for the US
It will become apparent in the long term that China was the real winner
By Kirill Babaev, PhD, director of the Institute of China and Modern Asia of the Russian Academy of Sciences, professor of the Financial University, and deputy chairman of the Presidium of the National Committee for BRICS Research.
In 2023, the volume of trade between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait was $268 billion. This means Taipei traded more with its main adversary, Beijing, than with its foremost ally, Washington. And for Chinese business, Taiwan was a more important counterparty than the state’s key strategic partner, Russia.
These facts are important for an understanding of the current relationship between the two parts of China. They are inextricably linked not only by the commonality of language, history, and culture, but also by hundreds of thousands of trade and production contracts. And this may prove to be a decisive factor in the long-term struggle for the island between the great powers.
The elections in Taiwan on January 13 did nothing to change this. On the contrary, apart from pro-American candidate Lai Qingde’s victory (with a far-from-solid 40% of the vote), the parliamentary elections revealed the defeat of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, which lost its majority and ten seats in the Legislative Yuan to the conventionally “pro-Chinese” Kuomintang Party.
The outcome has made the island’s power system somewhat unstable, suggesting that the main battle between Washington and Beijing over Taiwan is yet to come. However, the US has only one undeniable advantage in this war – the ability to pump its proxy with weapons and defense systems in anticipation of a violent conflict. China, on the other hand, has far more leverage. Thus, in the coming years, Beijing won’t try to solve the Taiwan problem militarily: on the contrary, it will attempt to turn America’s “Pyrrhic victory” on January 13 into a final US defeat in the next elections on the island.
In his first post-election comments, winning candidate Lai (who won’t officially become president until May) spoke in a peaceful way about Beijing and Sino-Taiwanese relations, without in any way trying to demonstrate a desire to unilaterally declare the island’s independence. US leaders have also spoken in the same vein, stressing that they intend to develop only “informal” relations with Taiwan, while continuing to be guided by the “One-China” principle.
As a result, Taiwan is now well aware that the path to independence is a dead end, as none of Taipei’s closest allies will endorse the move or recognize the existence of an “alternative China.” The path of maintaining the status quo, on the other hand, is the most unstable, because in this case the sword of Damocles of armed conflict between the US and China will hang over Taiwan, in which the island risks losing its entire economy and many thousands of its citizens’ lives.
The only option for Taiwan in the long term is a compromise with mainland China; some kind of full-fledged arrangement that will allow the island to maintain the way of life and economic system that it’s accustomed to, and that will allow Beijing to consider the question of reunification closed, or at least with a clear, if distant, solution.
Hong Kong may partly serve as a model for such a solution, but in the case of Taiwan, the compromise is likely to be much softer. Beijing and Taipei could agree on a roadmap to reunification by 2049 – ending a century-long cycle of confrontation. That plan could well lead to a union state along the lines of the EU or Russia and Belarus.
Of course, such an outcome would be good for all Chinese on both sides of the strait, as it would remove all risk of armed conflict or a ‘hostile takeover’ of Taiwan by the PRC. These are precisely the outcomes feared by all those who voted for Lai on January 13.
Only one country would be extremely disadvantaged by such a cross-strait arrangement, namely the US. Washington has invested too much in the doctrine of containment of China, in the formation of a chain of military and political alliances around its borders and a defense belt on the island of Taiwan itself, to lose this “unsinkable aircraft carrier.” Of course, the Americans will do everything in their power to oppose any kind of agreement between the two parts of China, whatever it may be.
But attempts to move Taiwan away from Chinese shores and closer to the US coast are geographically meaningless. As Beijing’s economic power grows, the importance of the Sino-Taiwan economic relationship will only increase (even if bilateral trade temporarily declined in 2023). The status quo that Washington has fought so hard to preserve is actually more favorable to China. It seems that President Lai Qingde will prove to be a much more balanced politician than the outgoing leader, Tsai Ing-wen. If this is the case, it may well come to pass that the January 13 elections were actually won by Beijing, not Washington.
Peter Man Comments
The author, as a smart PhD, should state the obvious. All Taiwan election results are bad for the US.
Once again, I will say something not echoing media platitudes. China is, in fact, conducting long-term strategic actions to weaken the hegemon, which will eventually collapse by exhaustion. This strategy has been applied many times in China’s history, and as a history lover, I will illustrate with one example, the war between Chu and Wu during the Spring and Autumn Era (771 – 476 BCE). This was the early Zhou feudal era when historians began recording state annals. Chinese annals in those days were known as Spring and Autumn, meaning a year. It came from the Shang, Chinese civilization’s progenitor, who did not have summer and winter seasons so spring and autumn represented a year.
Near the end of this era, the barbarian (culturally and linguistically non-Chinese) state of Chu in the south along the middle part of the Yangzi River became a behemoth. After making a strong matrimonial alliance with Qin in the northwest, which lasted until Qin Shihuang unified China, Chu threatened and made war on every state in the north while encroaching and swallowing small states to its east. The last bulwark against Chu’s eastern expansion to the Pacific coast was Wu, a small barbarian state centered around Suzhou to the west of Shanghai. Chinese annals recorded that Wu natives shaved their heads and tattooed their bodies, decidedly non-Chinese practices.
At the time, Chu had subjugated many small tribes and states between themselves and Wu, creating a buffer zone as well as a launch pad for future wars against Wu. When looking at this behemoth state of Chu with a hundred times the power of this small state of Wu living on the plains of Huai River, it would appear that Wu’s fate was sealed. Instead, over two generations, Wu would not only survive but defeat Chu in every battle, eventually capturing Chu’s capital.
One of Wu’s strategies was to light up endless fires in the buffer zone. Chu could not maintain its hegemony without reacting. Each time there was trouble, Chu had to send its army over long distances across mountainous areas, and each time Wu would withdraw into a defensive position nearby. When the Chu army, being tired, far from home and uncertain of their vassals’ loyalty, decided to retreat, the Wu army would ambush them and cause further damage. Thus, Wu, at very little cost, exhausted Chu (疲于奔命) and eventually defeated them.
The history of the Chu and Wu conflict is a much bigger story, but this illustrates how a big, hegemonic country with its fingers in every pie can be weakened from exhaustion caused by endless small fires. Knowing this, I’m not surprised that China is not using its weight to put out small fires. All this talk of China helping America cool things down in the Middle East or West Asia is just wishful thinking.
Another thing that China definitely should be aware of and which I have always averred, the US and Japan will not intervene militarily should the PLA decide to land in Taiwan. Chang Ya-chung, the deep blue KMT member who advocates immediate negotiations with China for peaceful reunification, said as much in a recent interview.
In short, Stop dreaming anyone will come and rescue us in a war with mainland China. If there is war, Taiwan will be destroyed like Ukraine. I guarantee not a single GI will die for you. Why not? Because their opponent will be the PRC, a well-armed nuclear state, America is not that stupid. They will tell you all kinds of rubbish to sell arms and use you as a proxy.
They will use you, the Taiwanese people, as a pawn and sacrifice you in a heartbeat.
So you better wake up and do what’s best for Taiwan and its people.” For all pols and pundits who paint Chang as a red communist trojan horse, he welcomes holding a public debate, but no one wants to take him up on the challenge.
No one wants that debate lest people learn the bitter truth.
Chang, as the principal of Dr. Sun College is well respected as an educator and well-liked by young Taiwanese. These well-educated young voters are not stupid. They voted en mass for Ko because they’re disillusioned with the corrupt KMT led by a scumbag who appointed an unwinnable nonentity as the presidential candidate.
I ran an Engineering department that covered military equipment scattered across the country.
We had specialised staff based out of an office building who were dispatched nationwide as required.
We had a good atmosphere. Staff worked hard and long as required and when it was quiet were compensated with additional vacation days and “under the table” days off. Overtime was not available.
For example – it was fairly normal for an eng team to leave home at 4 in the morning to be at an airbase for 7:30, leave at 8 pm and do the same the next day, and for as long as required. The company refused to give hotel accommodation, considering every base within the country “drivable”.
A new admin boss took over and a biometric system was implemented. A decree was issued that EVERY member of staff MUST clock in and out, and while clocking out could be any time, clocking in had to be between 7 and 7:30 am.
I fought it for about 6 months but eventually was told to toe the line or leave.
It was no longer possible to pay staff back with vacation days, official or unofficial, and the company immediately lost hundreds of hours of productivity with staff, understandably cutting back their hours, feeling unappreciated. As their boss (and a human being) I could no longer ask them to work the ridiculous hours they had been previously working, knowing there was no compensation available.
Another productivity masterstroke from the same guy was the removal of all printers from eng department, putting us on the print server located on a different floor, sharing with other departments.
The boss had previously implemented a rule that petty cash could only cover items up to USD 80. One day we ran out of toner for the color printer, had to print documents for a top level meeting.
The boss, wanting to impress by cutting stationery costs, had delayed signing approval for purchase of toner, ordered weeks earlier, so the cupboard was bare! I contacted the IT guy and explained about the meeting, who was going to be there, and that the boss wasn’t around and he nipped out to the local mall and picked up toner at a cash cost of USD 81. As punishment, for exceeding the 80 buck limit, the boss removed all printers from Engineering.
These things happen when people get promoted beyond their capability.
One, was a friend of a friend. He was actually a pretty smart guy, and did programing of some sort. The guy’s personal life was a disaster. His wife left him, he bought a car he couldn’t afford, then got fired from his job. He kept the car but stopped making payments, and hid the car so they couldn’t repo it. He was staying at my friends house for a while and he screwed that up as well by being a jerk to his hosts. So, he finally found a job as a programmer, and it seemed he was going to be able to turn his life around. His first day on the job, he sent an email to upper management, and basically cc’d the entire company, telling them everything they were doing wrong. >They came to see him, thanked him for coming in, and fired him. This guy is a total dufus.
The second is almost the same. A friend mine, never seems to be able to hold a job. She told me she got hired at a new place. She wanted to make her mark there, so sent the president and the executive a long e-mail about how they could improve the company by taking her advice, and listed a bunch of her suggestions. This, after working there for less than a week.. yup she got fired.
Snow fell in Texas and the whole metroplex closed down. School was cancelled, power outages disabled many households, and I found myself collecting fallen branches in our front yard to make a fire for warmth.
My worries about entertaining my five young kids for the day, however, quickly dwindled as my two oldest began to organize an elaborate project in the back yard.
“Come on, let’s build an igloo!” they hollered.
I thought, “OK, that’s not going to work, but at least they’ll be occupied for a while.”
Bradley, my oldest, gathered supplies, while Amber helped my younger kids get dressed in layers of their warmest clothes. Garden gloves had to suffice for hand ware, but nobody minded. Excitement lit up the house to where we barely needed electricity.
I went to work starting a fire in the fireplace and preparing a crude meal that required no heat.
I looked outside and saw the meager beginnings of a snow structure and, after feeling a bit sorry for them, thought, “This might be a great chance for my kids to use real-life problem solving skills.”
The next time I looked out, I was amazed! Someone had the idea to empty out the sidewalk chalk boxes and use the plastic containers as molds for the igloo blocks.
They worked all day on that igloo, eventually building it up to Bradley’s head. As the sun went down, they made plans to finish the structure the next day.
All my kids went to bed early, as there was really nothing much to do in the dark, and they were exhausted from their laborious day.
Then, my husband came home from work. His business never closed. He parked in the driveway behind our house and came in through the back door. Being so dark, he ran right into the igloo, got snow “all over” him and became irate.
He destroyed the igloo, claiming that the weather would soon become warm, the snow blocks would melt, the grass underneath would be saturated, resulting in a huge mud puddle and a ruined lawn. He then got a shovel and a flash light and spread the snow all over the back yard. The igloo was gone and I was furious.
That was February.
The crushing of the igloo had crushed my kids’ hearts, and when I stood at the window watching my husband with a shovel and a flashlight spread out snow to preserve his lawn, something else was crushed too. My denial — at how dysfunctional our marriage was — shattered, and other fits of his unnecessary anger over the last decade flooded my mind, just like that igloo was going to flood the backyard.
I filed for divorce in March.
That was 14 years ago, and I am now happily married to a man who would never dream of crushing a child’s igloo.
After getting rejected in his first interview of the day, he was naturally dejected. So he entered the room with a frustrated face.
He was hardly interested in the company profile and such was his mood that he wanted to take someone on.
Interviewer: Are you fine? You don’t look well!
Friend: I haven’t eaten since morning, I prepared for my previous interview so well and got rejected in the very first round.
I: So, did you prepare for this interview as well?
F: No! I was more interested in that company. And I wanted to give my best at one place.
I: Do you know trading?
F: No! I don’t!
I: Then why are you interested in this company?
F: For the money! Do you think all those standing outside know trading?
I: Atleast some of them might?
F: I’m telling you, they don’t.
I: So you are a student of geology, right? How do think you’ll be able to manage working in a trading company?
F: There is a novel named Liar’s Poker in which the male protagonist was a student of Art History and ended up getting trained at Salomon Brothers. He works as a financial journalist now. And yes, it’s not fiction, the guy wrote it as his semi-autobiography. I think I will be fine.
(He knew he scored there)
(After asking some basic tell-me-about-you questions)
I: What’s your biggest strength?
F: I’m very patient.
I: See! We need people who are dynamic and full of energy. I don’t think patience and our required qualities go hand in hand.
(This was like a tipping point for him)
F: Have you heard of Rahul Dravid? He is regarded as one of the most patient cricketer. Yet, once he had the fastest fifty in ODIs. When he played his first T-20, he hit 3 consecutive sixes. Just because someone is patient doesn’t mean they can’t be dynamic and aggressive.
(Interviewer gave a smile at this answer)
Result: Selected
UFC fighters were assaulted by the woke mob
Federal Reserve Chairman: U.S. Debt “Unsustainable”
The United States is on an “unsustainable” path with regard to its national debt and it is time to address the issue, Jerome Powell said in an interview aired Sunday.
The US national debt currently stands at more than $34 trillion, according to the US Treasury.
“In the long run, the US is on an unsustainable fiscal path. The US federal government’s on an unsustainable fiscal path. And that just means that the debt is growing faster than the economy,” Powell told CBS’ “60 Minutes” news program.
“It’s probably time, or past time, to get back to an adult conversation among elected officials about getting the federal government back on a sustainable fiscal path,” he said in the interview, which was recorded on Thursday.
In the CBS interview, Powell reiterated that stance, saying it was unlikely that a rate cut would come at the next meeting of the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) in March.
“I think it’s not likely that this committee will reach that level of confidence in time for the March meeting, which is in seven weeks,” Powell said.
The VC/NVA had dedicated SIGINT (signals intelligence) units involving in radio interception, telephone tapping, and code-breaking. Their members were fluent in many languages. In 1970, the U.S. 25th Infantry Division found a North Vietnamese SIGINT facility hidden underground near the Thi Tinh River; every single radio communication of the U.S. 1st and 25th Divisions had been logged, and the intercepts translated into Vietnamese.
In 1966, all 14 Vietnamese barbers working in the U.S. 25th Infantry Division’s base camp were Vietcong sympathizers. They didn’t cut anybody’s throat but they did gather intelligence.
The first B-52 operational losses of the Vietnam war took place on 18 June 1965 when two B-52s were destroyed in a mid-air collision, costing American taxpayers 20 million dollar.
In early 1970, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces made a short incursion into Cambodia and discovered huge NVA compounds containing: 4,793 small arms, 730 mortars, over 3 million rifle rounds, 6.5 million anti-aircraft rounds, 7,285 rockets, 124 trucks, nearly 1 thousand tons of rice and a telephone switchboard.
A report issued by the Pentagon in 1973 estimated that 35% of all enlisted men who had served in Vietnam had tried heroin and 20% had been addicted at some point during their tour.
By 1968, the U.S. had set up 40 ice-cream plants in Vietnam and 760,000 tons of supplies were being delivered every month. American movies, stage shows, color TVs, chilled beer, Napoleon brandy, etc. were readily available. Rear-echelon troops could imagine they were still back home.
Some 10,000 U.S. servicemen lost at least one limb in Vietnam – more than in World War II and Korea put together.
The number of U.S. helicopter lost during the war: 4,865.
Eight (8) million tons of bombs were dropped on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, 4 times more than the amount dropped in all of World War 2.
The amount of ammunition fired per U.S. soldier was 26 times greater in Vietnam than during World War II.
For each artillery shell or rocket hitting its base camp, the U.S. 25th Infantry Division’s official policy was to fire 1,000 shells on the surrounding countryside in retaliation. (Talking about a rich man’s war, huh)
Lucky number 13: An estimated 27 thousands tons of unexploded ordnance were littered throughout the country at the end of the war. In November 2015, one unexploded 406mm naval shell was unearthed from a garden in Quang Tri Province, near the former Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Presumably, this 2,000-pound shell was fired from the battleship USS New Jersey.
14. Over 18 million gallons (or 72 million liters) of defoliants were used throughout the war, even now Vietnamese children are being born with horrifying physical disabilities as a direct result of the US use of chemical defoliants.
15. In 1965, around 42% of all chemical defoliants sprayed in South Vietnam were aimed at food crops, and the country quickly went from rice exporter to rice importer.
16. At the peak of their commitment, South Korea had 44,829 troops in South Vietnam, Australia had 7,672, Philippines sent 2,000, Taiwan sent 31 and Fascist Spain sent 13 men. Morocco sent 10,000 cans of sardines.
17. By the early 1970s, years before the war’s end, South Vietnam’s landscape was already pockmarked with an estimated 21 million bomb and artillery craters, covering some 350,000 acres in all.
18. At its peak, the U.S. effort in Vietnam was soaking up 37% of all American military spending and required the fighting strength of more than 50% of all Marine Corps divisions, 40% of all combat-ready army divisions, and 33% of the navy.
19. In mid 1969, the GI underground newspaper in Vietnam, “GI Says,” publicly offered a $10,000 reward for the death of Lieutenant-Colonel Weldon Honeycutt, the officer responsible for the disastrous attack on Hamburger Hill in May that year. There were at least 7 attempts, but Honeycutt managed to live out his tour and return to the U.S.
20. US Navy pilot (later Senator and 2008 Presidential Candidate) John McCain was taken prisoner by North Vietnam on October 26, 1967 when his A-4 aircraft was shot down over Hanoi. Upon discovering that his father was the admiral commanding all U.S. forces in the Pacific, North Vietnam offered to return him early, in exchange for his cooperation. McCain, however, insisted that standard military procedures be followed and prisoners of war be returned in the order of their date of capture. He ended up spending 5 and a half years in captivity and was frequently tortured.
3 of my kids were in a horrible car accident. 2 only had minor injuries but my youngest son, Joe, was severely injured. He had a brain injury and fractured orbital plane requiring immediate surgery. When the insurance company settled the 2 received $1500.00 in a trust until they turned 18. But Joe was awarded $35,000. The courts insisted the trust was a regular bank, which had lower interest rates, rather than my credit union. When the bank received the 2 trusts for $1500 we decided to put the money into CDs, at the time CDs were getting 8–9% interest. Then Joe’s case was settled and the money sent to the same bank. However the bank refused to put his into a CD, instead they put into regular savings which paid maybe 3%. My husband went to his business bank and had them look over the court order. That bank said there was no valid reason for not putting the money onto a CD and they requested a wire transfer to their bank placed all 3 into an even higher rate termed to end when each turned 18. As a result Joe had 65,000 dollars when he graduated from high school. The 1st bank tried to fight the move but the court backed us up. Their loss Joe’s win.
Ancient Romans Reproduced so much that A Plant Went Extinct
Ancient Romans and Greeks used a plant called Silphium as a super effective contraceptive. But here’s the crazy part: they used it so much that it actually went extinct. Can you imagine that? This plant was so important to them, and they relied on it so heavily, that they ended up losing it forever.
Its heart-shaped seeds are thought to be the reason we associate the symbol with romance to this day.
It was cherished by the Romans and held such a special place in their hearts that they immortalized it in poems, songs, and esteemed works of literature. Its popularity was so profound that it contributed to the wealth and prosperity of the city of Cyrene, located in modern-day Shahhat, Libya, making it the wealthiest city in Africa.
The history of silphium can be traced back to ancient times. It was first mentioned in writings by the Greek poet Hesiod in the 8th century BCE, and it was also referenced in the works of other ancient Greek writers, including Theophrastus and Aristotle. The ancient Greeks believed that silphium was a gift from the gods and valued it highly for its medicinal properties.
The Greek residents of Cyrene valued silphium to such an extent that they depicted its silhouette on their currency before relinquishing control to the Romans. The significance of this extraordinary plant was even recognized by Julius Caesar, who stored an impressive stockpile of 1,500 pounds (680 kilograms) in the official treasury.
It grew abundantly in the wild in ancient North Africa, particularly in the region that is now modern-day Libya. It had large heart-shaped leaves, tall stalks, and yellow flowers, which grew in clusters. It was unique in its flavor and aroma. The leaves and stems were used to flavor food and wine, while its juice was used as a natural remedy for a variety of ailments.
Not only as a contraceptive and in beverages, but Silphium was also used for treating a variety of medical conditions such as coughs, sore throats, and indigestion.
The plant grew only in a small region around Cyrene, which made it a rare and valuable commodity. As the plant became more and more scarce, its price skyrocketed, making it became more valuable and further increasing the demand for it. Despite efforts to cultivate the plant and protect it from overharvesting, it ultimately proved to be unsustainable and went extinct.
The loss of the Silphium plant had significant consequences for the ancient Greeks and Romans. Without access to this effective form of birth control, the population of these societies may have grown at a faster rate, leading to increased competition for resources and potentially putting strain on their economies and environments.
But the story of Silphium doesn’t end there. In fact, its extinction may have had even wider-reaching consequences. The plant was not only used as a contraceptive but also as a remedy for a variety of ailments. Its loss meant that people were no longer able to rely on it for these medical purposes, and they had to find alternative treatments. This had a major impact on the health and well-being of the ancient Greek and Roman people.
The extinction of the Silphium plant serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of overconsumption and the need to carefully manage our use of natural resources. It also serves as a reminder of the important role that plants like Silphium have played in human history, and the need to preserve and protect the biodiversity of our planet. So the next time you hear about a plant or animal going extinct, remember the story of Silphium and the lessons it holds for us all.
Today, the exact identity of silphium remains a mystery, as no specimens of the plant have survived. However, it is believed to have been related to the fennel or giant fennel plant, and its medicinal properties are thought to have been due to a resinous substance contained within the plant. The legacy of silphium can still be seen in ancient artwork and writings, which depict the plant and its many uses.
I was investigated by CID, are you selling drugs? Are you working in a strip club? Are you dating men who give you money?
A rumor that I was sleeping with the Post Commanding General went around my unit.
I was placed on night shift, and every crosswalk duty for a month.
My promotion paperwork for an upcoming board disappeared.
Keep in mind this was at Ft. Benning GA in 1997, I was an MP (military police)
The” war on drugs” was still around and the perception in the news was that the only African Americans who drove luxury cars were drug, that was the “obvious” conclusion.
My Platoon sergeant finally pulled me into his office and asked “private, how in the hell can you afford a brand new Mercedes!” I told it was 7 years old, she just looked good, it was the entry level Mercedes so was affordable and my payments were about 125.00 a month (can’t remember exact amount).
He sat back and just laughed, and said “ok that makes sense”
Now remember this was 1997, AOL was just coming out so an online search was not possible. And it never occurred to the big heads in CID to ask me how much I paid for the car, how old was it, all the questions my platoon Sergeant asked me. I am still shaking my head about that.
I was more mad that people thought that I would sleep with the Commanding General, I was 22 so he was probably 50+ so in my young eyes he was oooold, like The Crypt Keeper old! ROFL!
I have always driven a MB since, have two in the garage now.
This is the same prejudicial calculus behind the pogroms, lynchings, riots and destruction suffered repeatedly by Chinese communities around the world over the last few centuries.
In Indonesia, formerly known as Batavia, it has happened repeatedly, and it will happen again.
In Malaysia, the Emergency eventually led to depopulation of the Chinese through the forced Separation of Singapore, and the implementation of race-specific policy to encourage emigration through the clever use of Singapore as a relief valve.
In America, a massive wave of violence against Chinese immigrants beginning in the 1870s culminated in the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Scott Act, and the Geary Act in the 1880s-1890s. There were massive celebratory demonstrations in California each time an act was passed.
YELLOW PERIL became a crystallized phrase in the press at the turn of the 20th century.
Chinese in America were bottom of the ladder, and treated worse than vermin.
Fast forward to the 21st century and the same attitudes persist. If the US could, it would have bombed Beijing or Shanghai like Gaza is being pounded today, and insist it isn’t a genocide.
Considering what his ancestors perpetrated repeatedly, Tom exhibited nothing more than rude antics, part of the election gameplan in a crucial “winner takes all” Presidential election year.
What we must bear in mind is the naked prejudice revealed and confirmed by the performance, and how the same sentiment can rapidly boil over into hate that require bloodletting to calm.
We should all make preparations for war in East Asia in the coming decade.
BULLETIN: EUROPEAN COUNTRY ISSUES NOTAM FOR “UNPLANNED MILITARY ACTIVITY NECESSARY TO PROTECT NATIONAL SECURITY”
We now have an precise date window for the outbreak of World War 3 in Europe. A country has issued a NOTAM for “Unpanned military activity necessary to protect national security.” This LIFE-SAVING content is now open to the General Public —
Poland has issued a Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) involving the ENTIRE eastern 1/4 of the country of Poland from Gdansk in the north to the southern tip of the country, including the border with Belarus and Ukraine.
Specifically, the Polish Air Navigation Services Agency (PANSA) in Coordination with the Polish Air Force has Introduced a Notice-to-Air-Missions (NOTAM) from February 5th to May 5th for the entire East of the Country on the Border with Ukraine due to the reported possibility of Unplanned Military Actions related to ensuring National Security.
The NOTAM requires any Civilian Aircraft which is Operating inside of the Zone to remain in Radio Contact with Flight Authorities and to Activate their Transponder as to prevent their Disruption of Increased Activity by Military Aircraft.
Hal Turner Analysis
It seems to me, as a guy with average intellect, the only reason Poland would do this is because they KNOW there will be a NATO entry into the Russia-Ukraine war during this specific time period, and as soon as that entry begins, war between NATO and Russia will ensue. The NOTAM was issued yesterday and began yesterday, February 5, so WE ARE ALREADY IN THE WINDOW for the start of actual World War 3.
Also, as a regular guy with average intellect, this notice tells me they don’t yet know the specific date, but they know the window of time, which, to me, means when this comes, it will happen like a lightning bolt from the sky. I suspect we, the general public, will have NO WARNING AT ALL.
For weeks now, European countries have been telling their citizens to stock-up on Prescription medicines they may need to live. Many people found this advice curious; after all, why would there be a need to do something like that? Now, we seem to know why.
It looks to me as though they have been planning a NATO entry into the Ukraine war for quite some time, and they’re trying to prep the public for the war that NATO is going to cause.
In addition to countries in Europe telling their people to stock up on Prescription medicines, other nations, like Sweden and the UK, have been openly telling their citizens to “prepare for war” with emergency food, water, medicine, fuel, flashlights, batteries and portable radios for news.
So, it seems to me, the writing on the wall is now blazingly clear.
As all readers may recall, Russia made plain at the start of their Special Military Operation (SMO) into Ukraine, that if NATO chose to enter the conflict, Russian conventional forces are NOT comparable to NATO. Russia admitted that from the start.
Russia then also made clear that “We are a nuclear power, and our abilities in this area are superior to NATO.” Russia finished by saying, “If NATO declares Article 5 Collective Self Defense against Russia, it will be a war that no one will win.”
Those words . . . . “a war no one will win” is a nuclear war.
So we are now in the window for the outbreak of actual nuclear war, from right this minute, until May 5.
I earnestly hope my readers have stocked-up on Emergency food, water, medicines, an electric generator with stored fuel to run it, so as to have electricity for refrigerators, freezers, maybe some light.
We are OUT OF TIME. You have to possess these things NOW or get what you can IMMEDIATELY.
As I mentioned earlier, it seems to me we will have ZERO warning about this. When it begins, it will likely escalate so fast, none of us will have any time to react.
If you don’t have your emergency supplies before this breaks out, there will be no way at all for you to get them.
The general public – who wait until the very last minute to do — . . . anything . . . . — will be in shear panic. Stores will be immediately flooded with shoppers trying to get their hands on anything they can. It will be chaos. Bedlam.
Store shelves will be wiped clean within a couple hours.
So if you don’t have your stuff, you won’t be able to get it.
Please, in the name of Almighty God, I implore you to get prepped right now.
You need:
Shelf-stable foods: Pasta, Rice, Dried Beans, Canned meats, Canned vegetables, Condiments (Ketchup, Mustard, Mayonnaise, Salt, Pepper, SUGAR), cooking oil, Jarred pasta sauces and the like.
WATER! A human needs 8 eight-ounce glasses of water, per day, to survive. If the nukes fly, the public water supply will become contaminated. You MUST have water stored. Not for doing dishes, or showering, but to consume and cook with!
Medicines you take to survive. For instance, my wife had Thyroid cancer and her Thyroid was surgically removed. But a human cannot live without Thyroid Hormone, so she has to take a pill EVERY DAY just to continue living. If she runs out of those pills, by day 5 of no pill, she will be dead.
If YOU or your family members take medicines to live, YOU need to stock up. Tell your doctor to give you a prescription so you can stock up. Tell him why you want it. And pay for it with your own money, because your insurance company WILL NOT PAY.
A generator or some type of small solar array with a battery. You need to be able to power your refrigerator/freezer a couple hours a day to prevent food from spoiling. Have spare fuel for that generator, but don’t store flammable fuel in your house. It has to be outside. And NEVER run a generator indoors. Gas-operated generators give off carbon monoxide gas which is LETHAL. You would die from the fumes within minutes if you ran the generator indoors.
COMMUNICATIONS GEAR: Get yourself a small, cheap CB Radio ($39) with a small antenna for your car or your house. If this thing happens, and I believe it will, our electric grid may go down. All the TV and Radio stations have generators, but they may go down too after a few days of no power. YOU have to be able to communicated with neighbors, friends, and the like.
Get a SHORTWAVE RECEIVER – small ones operate on batteries. They’ll let you hear the news from many countries around the world. You’ll be able to keep informed! Have spare batteries for it, too.
Flashlights for each family member and replacement batteries for each light.
The list is **NOT** complete, and for some of us, what we “need” seems endless, but these are the absolute essentials you need. PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THEM.
I was working on a ship, we were in a relatively mild storm, and a line had come loose and was flapping in the wind. I sent the deck hand out to secure it, he was wearing a floatation jacket, to keep him dry, and keep him afloat, if he fell over board. There was a railing all the way around the deck, except for the stairway. Since it wasn’t a bad storm, he wasn’t required to put on a safety line, and to tell you the truth, back in the 1980s people were pretty lax about safety, and safety lines were not always worn when they should be.
Just before he left the bridge, I said, “You know what, we should practice with the safety line, when its easy to get around, rather than only gain experience when its dangerous”
He wasn’t happy, they were a pain in the rear, and got tangled in every thing. But he put it on, and just clamped it onto the railing, when a rogue wave hit, and washed him down the deck, and under the railing. I grabbed a safety line, clamped on, and started to pull him up. Another wave came and washed him right back onto the deck. I dragged him into the bridge.
We always used safety lines after that, in even mild storms.
We would take off a week or two around christmas to go visit family since we lived halfway across the US from them. Usually we would get a cat-sitter, but on one occasion, we didn’t have anybody lined up, and we were flying Southwest, which allows small animals in the cabin. I went by the airport to buy the special mesh carrier they require you to use as well as pay the fee for bringing an animal on-board.
On the day of travel, the cat is mildly sedated and attracting a lot of attention—people love animals in airports, and cats are especially uncommon to see.
While waiting for our connection, the attendants at the gate called us to the desk to inform us there was a family with cat allergies going to be on the same flight and to mitigate any issues, the family had opted to sit in the very back of the plane, and would we please mind boarding in the first group and selecting a seat towards the very front? Hell yeah! awesome, let’s do it!
So we aren’t the very first to board, the special priority members still got first dibs, but we do manage to get seats in the second row behind an older couple, so pretty good on distancing from the family with the allergies.
I’m holding the cat in the carrier on my lap while people board before sticking her under the seat, and at some point a passenger or flight attendant comments on how they love cats, at which point, the woman in the row ahead of us swivels to say “there’s a CAT?! but I’m allergic!”.
A nearby flight attendant explains that we are being seated up here to accommodate a family who also has an allergic member and that this woman and her companion are welcome to reseat in the back if it’s going to be a problem, but the cat will be confined to the carrier at all times, and they ask me to go ahead and put her under the seat in front of me, which I do.
“But, my husband needs the front row seat! His legs get cramps otherwise!”
“Well, you’re welcome to move back there by yourself then, ma’am”
It turned out she didn’t feel her allergies were severe enough to justify that. Her only symptoms I could observe during the flight were disdainful sniffs every so often.
I was very pleased at the respect paid to my cat, who was basically a ticketed passenger and had followed protocol, and I left the attendant a glowing review on the SWA site.
An amazing husband. An amazing father. Always putting his family first. An engineer. Smart. Smart as a whip.
At most things.
sometimes he does things and I don’t know wether to laugh or laugh and cry.
there was the the time he took back a new pair of shoes because the left one was too tight. The salesman with a deadpan face pulled the paper stuffing out if the shoe and said, try it now.
there was the time he got banned from the neighborhood gas station because he drove off with the gas handle still in the gas tank.
The time he jumped on his new racing bike but forgot there were no pedals. Yes I helped him up off the yard and died laughing.
so.., you get it.
I mentioned it to him once, for a smart guy you sure do a lot of not-so smart stuff.
He smiled. And shrugged his shoulders, ya, go figure, when someone’s smart brain switch turns on that bright, something else up there has to shut off.
When I still practiced dentistry, I was running tight on time getting to work, but I had to fuel my stomach first or pay the consequences. So I stood in line at Panera’s, only one person in front of me, when a woman dashed in just as the cashier called, “Next!”
To my shock (and the guy ahead of me), the woman dashed right on up to the cashier and began to place her order.
I walked over and pointed out to the cashier how the other guy and I had been waiting at least ten minutes, while this woman she was waiting on had just now flown through the door. The cashier had already started ringing up the woman’s order, so said cashier sheepishly shrugged and grimaced a half-assed apology, like, What do you expect me to do now, it’s too late. And continued on.
Entitled woman, in the meantime, yelled at me, “I’m running late for work!” As though that explained everything. To which I replied, “So am I! But I was here first, and now you’re going to make me even more late.”
She waved me off as the cashier went to get her order.
Now for the satisfaction.
As I walked toward the door with my bag of food, entitled woman stood at a counter to add sugar, etc. to her extra-large coffee, when the cup flipped over and spilled its contents all across the counter and onto her.
It may have been mean of me, but I said loud enough for her to hear, “Perfect karma,” walked on by and out the door.
Rarely, some people managed to survive the gas chambers and were not killed immediately afterwards. One such person is Gena Turgel and her story is more than astonishing. She survived three Nazi concentration camps and in Auschwitz-Birkenau was forced naked into the gas chambers.
Gena and Norman
She was 16 when her hometown of Krakow, Poland, was bombed by the Luftwaffe on September 1, 1939, the first day of the war. Norman had relatives in Chicago, but the family delayed putting plans to move there into action, and Poland was quickly conquered by the Germans.
In the Jewish ghetto of Krakow Gena lost two brothers fighting against the Nazis. She was then sent to Plaszow concentration camp, where she survived for two and a half years until her transfer to Auschwitz. There she survived numerous experiments conducted by Nazi “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele.
The most surprising part of her story is that she did not realize she was in a gas chamber until another prisoner told her. “Do you know what just happened? You were in a gas chamber!”. said Gena: “I never realized I was in the gas chamber… It must not have worked.
The “Krema 1” gas chamber at Auschwitz.
Here is how she described his path to the gas chamber,
“We went into that room with the stone floor and holes in the ceiling. We were shivering, it was very cold, and we were waiting and waiting.”
In Auschwitz, “the water was undrinkable and we lived mainly on beet soup,” she wrote. “Everywhere we went the horrible stench of the crematoria followed us.”
The time spent in Auschwitz left its consequences. Since then, Gena wore her perfume to forget the smell of the camp.
After two months in Auschwitz, as the Red Army advanced toward Auschwitz, she was sent on a “death march,” first to Buchenwald concentration camp and then to Belsen, where she shared a barrack with Anne Frank and offered herself as a nurse because of her knowledge of German. When Belsen was liberated by the British, she showed a young army officer, Norman Turgel, the hospital where she worked.
In October 1945, she and Sergeant Turgel were married in Lübeck, Germany, in a synagogue that the Germans had used as a stable during the war. She was 21 years old at the time.
Mr. Turgel died in 1995. Mrs. Turgel is survived by her three children, eight grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren. Gena Turgel died on June 7, 2018 at her home in England at the age of 95.
This story is true, but you don’t have to trust me: feel free to do your research on the internet.
Local grocery store where my niece worked for a while. One day I saw a sale on my favorite ice cream that I could not believe. It said on the sign 5 for $2.00. Wow I thought, that’s either a bad mistake by an employee misplacing the numbers, or just maybe the ice cream was out of date. I check dates and they were fine. So I grabbed five of my favorite flavors and headed to pay. I was fully expecting to pay $5 for two of them, which was still a bargain.
At the self checkout I rang them up and sure enough they were $5 for two. No problem I had taken a photo of the sign, and call the cashier over. I explained the situation and the sign. The lady then calls over a manager, who I explain again about the sign and the pricing. She does some button pushing, some things pop up on the screen, and she leaves saying she will go correct the sign. I said I was perfectly fine paying the $5 for two, but just wanted to let them know it was confusing. All went fine so I thought. They were nice and courteous as usual.
I get home and pack my 5 delicious pints of ice cream into our freezer. I was just curious what they charged me for the single pint, so I grabbed the receipt to have a look. Well, the only thing I could find for ice cream was that single $2.50 pint. Apparently the manager had deleted the other 4 from the que. I just got 4 free ice creams! I started thinking about it and I remember the employee had bagged up the ice cream herself as the manager punched away at the screen.
I called the store and explained the situation, saying I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble. I was told well it was an honest mistake and they didn’t take food back, so enjoy the sweets on them. I most certainly did enjoy those free pints which seem to taste better knowing they were free.
Know what? I’m homeless. I live in the driver’s seat of my Chevy Aveo.
I got there because my mom owned the house I was living in and paying her my house payments. I lost my job and she immediately told me she was going to sell the house. Keep in mind that I hadn’t missed a payment, and I offered her my 401K, which was ten months’ of payments to give me time to find a new job and keep things steady.
I have severe depression and anxiety, and this threw me into a severe depression episode where I talked about suicide. One of my friends freaked out about this and called the police who entered my house without permission and forced me out and into a shitty hospital. (That’s a whole other story. I came out in worse shape than when I went in.) While in the hospital, my family came and got my keys so my cats could be taken care of. Instead, they took my cats (who are at a foster home right now) and wouldn’t let me back in the house. They found a flipper, who paid $8,000 for my house and sold it for $80,000 after throwing out all of my possessions, putting a fresh coat of paint on everything and remodeling the bathroom.
I was left with my car, and that’s it. A friend took me in for a year, but he wanted to rent out the room I was in so I got kicked to the curb. That was 2 days before Thanksgiving.
I currently work 2 jobs but still don’t make enough to get a place to live. (Yay low wages.) I tried to take advantage of low income housing, but after a year and a half of filling out forms, there just isn’t anything, so I gave up. I’ve heard too many horror stories about shelters that I would rather sleep in my car when the temperatures get to 12 degrees than go there.
Quit trying to blame the poor and homeless people for their problems. Most of them would gladly work to pay for their own care and shelter. Until you’ve been there yourself, you’ll never understand because you just don’t want to see what’s really going on in this world.
I’ve told the story before, but an ex-friend of mine called in a panic 10 days before her wedding, telling me the caterer had cancelled. I was the only one she knew with catering experience and could I figure something out for the wedding?
We worked out a deal. If she could hire me two chef temps to help and pay for the food items, I’d give her the labor for her wedding gift.
Big mistake.
I spent a week and $1500 of my own money (that I really didn’t have) prepping food I’d bought wholesale, under the assumption that help would be arriving and that I’d have the money paid back.
The help never arrived. She said they wouldn’t work for an individual. That was blatantly false, but by this point I was scrambling.
Come the day of the wedding, I was frantically trying to get my home made pasta, bread, meatballs, sauces and sides to the venue. The venue employees were absolute angels who helped out in any way they could.
By the time it came to plate the food, we were a well oiled machine and it was amazing. And they even sent me home, telling me it was in their contract to clean up when it was all over. (I later learned this was my job, but they had already figured out I was being scammed and felt so bad for me.)
Two weeks later, the bride and I met up to settle the food payment. In fact, she suddenly changed the story, and said she was there for her wedding gift.
What.
The.
Fuck.
When she figured out I didn’t have one, she called me a terrible friend and stormed out. I had a bad feeling something was wrong. I called several other mutual friends and they came to the cafe I was at within the hour.
We hashed out what had happened to us. In fact, we all had wedding industry or industry adjacent jobs/skills. And she’d scammed all of us for our talents and money.
All in all, by telling us someone had cancelled and could we please do this and she’d pay us back, she got
Catering
A cake
Photography
Alterations and all three bridesmaids’ dresses sewn
Most of the venue payment
Decor
Flowers
She got what was essentially a free wedding from all of us, by conning us all.
We did get our money back eventually, but it took small claims court, a debt collector, and a few years of frustration.
Baked Ravioli and Cheese
Ingredients
1 (50 count) package frozen cheese ravioli
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 cups milk
1 1/2 cups cubed American cheese
3/4 cup crushed potato chips (optional)
Instructions
Cook ravioli according to package directions; drain.
Meanwhile, for sauce, melt butter in a large saucepan. Stir in flour. Add milk; cook and stir until slightly thickened and bubbly.
Add cheese; heat and stir until cheese is melted.
Salt and pepper to taste. Add cooked ravioli; stir gently.
Spoon into an 8 inch square baking dish.
Sprinkle crushed potato chips over.
Bake at 350 degrees F for 15 to 20 minutes or until edges bubble and top is golden brown.
I was in my 9th grade math class. One of my best friends brothers (he’s a year older than me) was sitting next to me. In front of me was another guy and we were in the back of the class in the corner.
The three of us are shooting crap, talking and messing around. We had finished an assignment and had a few minutes.
All of a sudden our principal comes over the loudspeaker.
“Teachers and students. I don’t know how to even start to say this. There’s been a shooting at Columbine.”
Everyone in the class went silent.
“We are on lockout until further notice. No one is to leave the school grounds and students who are off campus will not be allowed back in. Please, turn on the TV’s in your rooms for more information. I don’t know how many times I can say this out loud.
We are safe. Pray for Columbine.”
We were all in shock.
Columbine High School was about 10 miles from our high school.
My dad worked at Leawood Elementary, 2 blocks down the street, where the first kids ran.
Now, my dad normally worked nights, but he worked that day (and I don’t know why, maybe his boss was a closeted pot head, all I know was my dad was there that day.)
My dad was my first thought, since they didn’t know what was actually going on yet. Is my dad okay?!? What’s going on?
My second thought was about my mom. She worked at the central district office. What in the world was going on there? Then, my thoughts turned to my friends. Names I was lucky to not hear later on the news.
I know this sounds like it took minutes to think of all of this, but it was mili-seconds.
The whole class was in shock when the TV was on.
It showed the building that I had driven by every Friday night to take my dad dinner (Columbine). Another building….that my dad was in. The kids running away from the building with their heads covered.
We were all staring at the TV. Hoping that we’d recognize a face so that we would know our friends were safe.
Some kids cried. Others were in shock. No one spoke for what felt like hours. We just stared at the TV. Hoping it was just a dream, or a prank.
The bell rang, and we were dismissed to our next class.
That was the only time in my 4 years at my high school that the hallways were quiet. Once in a while you’d find a group of kids crying and holding each other. It was surreal.
I made it to the band room and was able to call my mom. It was a zoo at her office and my dad was safe, helping families who were coming to pick up their kids. He was in for a long night.
The day went on. Same thing. At 2:00 PM The principal gave us an update and let us know that we weren’t on lockdown anymore. You could tell he had been crying.
We went home that afternoon to watch the horrifying news unfold.
We know how the rest of the stories goes.
PS (if you’re interested)-I only had the courage to ask him (my dad) once about that day. It was about 7 years afterward.
I had only seen my dad cry 3 times in his whole life, and that was one of them.
He said that parents swarmed the school, searching for their children as the kids were brought to the school (I think by bus).
As the afternoon turned into evening, more and more parents were leaving, thankful that their kids were OK. There were parents of children who were injured that left with police officers and escorted to the hospitals.
There were parents whose children never showed up that afternoon.
My dad said it was about 8:00, one by one the parents were called into the office. They all knew what it meant to be the last parents there.
Some walked out crying. Some were in shock. Some screamed the most wretched noises he’s ever heard.
My dad was never really the same after that.
None of us were.
Abandoned $5.5 Million MEGA Mansion | Everything Left Behind
My father had a boyhood “best friend”. His name was Zeke.
He used to tell me stories. They would go fishing together as boys. They would do things. They would get drunk, and they would live their lives on “Polish Hill” a Polish-American suburb in Pittsburgh.
He was Zeke’s “best man” at his wedding. And he knew both Zeke and his wife quite well as they all were High School friends.
One day…
…I was perhaps 16 years old at the time, and having a long-distance, relationship with my girlfriend. With periodic phone calls, and weekend visits to her home in Lower Burrel, PA.
One day…
My father was crestfallen. He came home (from work) and was pale as a ghost.
It turns out that his buddy Zeke had an argument with his wife. It was pretty bad. And the wife took out a pistol and shot Zeke in the face.
BLAM!
It apparently blew most of his head off, and he was buried in a closed-casket.
It really shook my dad up, and I don’t blame him.
Now, myself, being much older… has had good long time “best Buds” Childhood friends dead… yeah I know what it is like.
Robbie… drug overdose. Marcus… Suicide by shotgun blast. My cousin Sincere’ … Coronavirus.
My brother, Daniel… I just don’t know… he doesn’t answer any e-mails. It’s been over a year now.
Life moves on.
People.
Life is too short to die over an argument. If you and your spouse are not getting along… then leave. No one needs to die over anything.
At the age of 39 I had it all. A loving wife, two fantastic kids, an apartment in New York City, a house in the country, new car, nice vacations and a high paying job as Creative Director of a hot creative advertising agency.
Everyone wanted to be me.
Except me.
On the outside I was the poster boy for Happy Successful Man Who Has His Whole Future Ahead Of Him. But deep down inside I was miserable.
I began to assault myself daily with that five word mantra. The one that so many of us begin muttering when they find themselves wandering through that unfamiliar, unsettling neighborhood known as midlife.
Is this all there is?
We don’t ask ourselves that question when we’re 25. It’s still too early in the first quarter of the game. We caught the ball on the five yard line and we’re making our way up the field.
But at 39, it’s halftime. Do the math. The average man is going to live till the age of 78. I was on the back nine.
I know — your actual mileage may vary. You could get killed falling off a ladder at age 60. Or at the age of 100 you could fall off a hooker. There’s a lot of latitude in The Middle. But somewhere between 30 and 50 you’re halfway done. It’s up to you to decide when to look at the face in the mirror and say:
Is this all there is?
No. There’s a whole lot more. And I’m going to tell you how to get there. Tonight I’m going to send someone to your house. He’s a teenager, about 17 or 18. He doesn’t know much about life — what teenager does? But he knows what’s cool. And after talking to you for a couple of hours, he’s going to be able to zero in on what’s a cool new direction for you to head in.
In fact, by the end of the evening, this kid is going to completely outline and plan the second half of your life. And that’s what you’ll do. Trust me, it will be cool.
What’s that you say? That’s the dumbest damn thing you ever heard? Why should you let some teenage kid with no world experience plan the second half of your life?
My answer is, why did you let him plan the first half?
This rut that you’re stuck in, this life that you’re trapped in, who planned it? Not you. Not the YOU you are now. Most of us form our life’s plans shortly after high school. Maybe we’re 16, maybe we’re 23, but for the most part we’re still kids. And then once we make a plan, we stick with it.
That was my insight. I was pushing 40 and still living the dream of some teenage kid.
That kid didn’t exist anymore, and yet I was still following the path he laid out for me. Most kids can’t project past next Saturday, much less conjure up what your life could be like 25 years down the road.
That was the moment I decided that the 40 year old me should start planning the life of the 60 year old me and beyond.
I was at the top of the ladder, and I suddenly realized I didn’t need one more rung. I wanted to find a new ladder.
I did. Climbing that ladder was at times terrifying, but never boring. Today I have all the things I had at the age of 39 and more. But this time around I’m deliriously happy with who I am and where I am. I still have dreams for the future, but I no longer wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and ask is this all there is?
My Act Two was conceived, written, produced, and directed by an adult. And I’m grateful for the insight that convinced him to take on the job.
EDIT – JANUARY 30, 2017: Dear People of Quora. I am overwhelmed by your response to my post. Not because the number of views and upvotes have skyrocketed, but because most of the comments and the private messages have asked me for more. Lots more.
One commenter, Traci Amick, said it like this: “Marshall, Marshall, Marshall… You can’t leave us hanging! When you made the decision to redirect and change your life what and how did you do it?”
There was a reason I left you hanging. I’ll get to that in a minute. But first, let me give you a brief (and I do mean brief) overview of what happened after the light bulb went on.
Here I was, pushing 40. At my core I’m a writer, but somewhere along the way the ad agency that hired me to write ads promoted me and paid me more money to stop writing and start managing. I wore suits, spent a lot more face time with clients, and I supervised a hundred other people. And while it was often gratifying, I realized that my career had stolen the one thing I loved doing most. Writing.
My solution was to start writing on my own. Over the course of countless nights and weekends I wrote a play, Squabbles, a comedy. Two years later it ran for eight weeks in a dinner theatre in Kansas City. (Since then it has played in thousands of theatres around the US.)
Shortly after Squabbles opened, ABC-TV asked me to turn it into a pilot for a sitcom. It didn’t fly, but now I was an accredited pilot writer, and for the next 6 years I kept my day job as an advertising agency Creative Director, and developed TV pilots for the networks on my own time. It’s unusual for a pilot to get picked up for a series, but two of mine did. I was 45 when the second one got picked up, and I decided to make the leap. I left advertising for TV.
I went to Hollywood, but it wasn’t fair to uproot my wife and kids to chase my dream, so they stayed in New York. I flew home as often as I could, which wasn’t often enough. Many of you asked if my quest for a new career wrecked my marriage. Just the opposite. After two years, despite the fact that I was on the fast track, I left Hollywood and came back to what was most important to me — my family.
There were some TV writing opportunities in New York, and I wrote a movie script which I sold and produced, and then — out of nowhere — a whole new creative avenue opened up. The Internet.
I caught the wave early. I opened Compelling Content, an Internet advertising agency, sold it five years later, and eventually zeroed in on the final frontier for every writer. A novel.
That took five years, and in 2006, I published The Rabbit Factory, my first crime fiction novel. Today I’m a #1 best selling author, with five books of my own, and the coauthor of the NYPD Red series with James Patterson.
I didn’t mention that in the original post because I didn’t want to be thrown off Quora for shameless self-promotion.
I’m not on Quora to sell my books. I’m here to exchange information, to share experiences, to give and take bits and pieces of life magic. I love this forum, and I’m grateful that one of my posts could resonate with so many of you.
One final note: Eight days after my original post I have a quarter of a million views, 3300 upvotes, and over 100 comments and messages. In the beginning, I responded to the comments, but I’ve reached the point where I no longer can. I wish I could, but I have to get back to my day job. Writing.
At the moment, I’m working on NYPD Red 5 with James Patterson. But this experience on Quora, especially your comments and messages, has made me realize that there are a lot of people out there going through the same mid life career angst that I went through. And that the 60,000 word version of my story just might make an interesting book.
EDIT 2 – FEBRUARY 15, 2017: One million views. Humbling to say the least (and I’m not exactly a guy who’s world famous for his humility).
The subject of life change is a hot button for most of us, but more often than not it’s the story of someone stuck in a dead end job who is looking for a better way. My experience wasn’t that. I walked away from a successful career that was stifling me, and today I’m thriving in the one I had been dreaming about.
I get a lot of head nods when I share my story in person, but I’m amazed that it resonated with so many people across this global forum.
Thank you for your eyeballs, your upvotes, and your feedback.
I was able to answer every direct message, but because of a Quora Quirk it’s extremely difficult to respond to the hundreds of comments. There’s no logic to the order in which they appear and no way to reorder them so the newest are at the top. That means I have to click on “comments,” scroll through five or six, then click on “more comments.” Eventually, I get to one I haven’t read yet, but as soon as I send a reply, the site takes me back to the top of the comments, and I have to go through the process all over again.
EDIT 3-MARCH 18, 2017: For those of you who wanted more details (really — it’s not my ego; some of you actually asked) I’ve expanded my answer into an article on Medium. Thank you for the encouragement. Here’s the link: The Thrills and Perils of Switching Careers
I rented the ground-level apartment in my friend’s split level for a few years. The guys who rented upstairs owned a party lighting company, and as a result they usually came home from work around 3 AM. I worked a nine-to-five job, and I’m a fairly light sleeper. When they came home from work, they’d occasionally turn on the TV, and usually fairly loud, which would of course wake me up, but most of the time I could drown out the noise by turning on a fan in my bedroom.
This was annoying but I could deal with it……until one of their girlfriends moved in upstairs. This nasty such-and-such had no problem with turning up the volume on the TV all the way, in the middle of the night every night, and watching for hours. This was the early years of flat-screen TVs and they had a big one, so likely it was verrrry expensive. When I knocked on the door to ask them to turn it down, I was told ‘this is when we get home from work and we’ll do what we want’. Even having my friend, their landlord, intervene, had no effect.
Well, a few nights of one or two hours’ sleep made me downright ingenious. I remembered that once, while microwaving my dinner, I had started vacuuming the floor and having both appliances turned on tripped the circuit breaker. I crossed my fingers that we were on the same circuit and during the next morning’s 3 AM showing of Willy Wonka, with the girlfriend screaming “I love this movie!” and turning the volume up even louder than usual, I turned on the microwave and the vacuum. Five seconds and poof! Blessed silence! I heard a little shuffling around upstairs, then one of them went down into the basement and reset the circuit breaker.
The power came back on, and so did the television. I waited about a minute before turning back on the microwave and vacuum. Poof! Silence! They reset the circuit breaker again, but this time there was no more TV. I went back to the most blissful slumber ever.
My friend later told me that they complained to him about the power going out because it was such an expensive TV and that could damage the electronics. I told him that if they kept the volume to a respectable level then I wouldn’t have to do anything about it, but I wouldn’t hesitate to if it happened again. The microwave/vacuum trick was only necessary a couple more times before they got the hint and kept the noise down in the middle of the night.
Chinese believes in owning assets and keeping a healthy cash flow. As a Chinese origin I do find western lease or rental mindset difficult to comprehend but it is a cultural thing.
Chinese people feel compel to own things and to not let others dictate lease terms to them. Westerners feel that buying assets when you can lease them makes more sense. But to me it is cultural. China is a 5000 years nation, the west like the U.S, Canada and Australia are merely 250 years or so. They are a warrior type mentality that fights all the time. I guess it impacted their mindset.
Chicken Scaloppini with Rustic Tomato Olive Spaghetti
The ingredients are married perfectly to enhance the chicken.
Ingredients
4 ounces multi-grain thin spaghetti
2 tablespoons olive oil, divided
1 large leek, white and light green parts, thinly sliced (or 1/2 cup chopped sweet onion)
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 (14.5 ounce) can diced fire roasted tomatoes, undrained
1 cup Lindsay® California Ripe Pitted Olives, halved lengthwise
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
2 egg whites
1/4 cup dried Italian seasoned bread crumbs
4 (4 ounces) skinless, boneless chicken breast halves, pounded to 1/4-inch thickness
1/4 cup thinly sliced fresh basil leaves
Instructions
Cook spaghetti according to package directions.
Heat 1 tablespoon of the oil in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Sauté leek and garlic in oil 2 minutes.
Add tomatoes, olives and pepper flakes; simmer over medium-low heat for 10 minutes or until thickened, stirring occasionally.
Meanwhile, beat egg whites with 1 tablespoon water in a shallow dish or pie plate.
Place bread crumbs in another shallow dish or pie plate.
Dip each cutlet in egg mixture letting excess drip off. Dredge in bread crumbs to coat each side lightly.
Heat remaining 1 tablespoon oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium heat. Add chicken; sauté for 3 to 4 minutes per side or until golden brown and cooked through.
Drain spaghetti; transfer to four serving plates. Spoon tomato sauce over spaghetti; top with chicken and garnish with basil.
Prep: 15 min | Cook: 15 min | Servings: 4
Nutrients Per Serving: Calories: 401, Calories from fat: 132, Total fat: 15g, Monounsaturated fat: 9g, Cholesterol: 73mg, Sodium: 683mg, Total Carbohydrates: 33g Dietary fiber: 4g Protein: 33g
I asked AI to make a Music Video… the results are trippy
Pol Pot (real name Saloth Sâr) was the dictator of Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, taking power at the end of the Cambodian Civil War. As soon as he took power, He and his administration transformed Cambodia into a one party communist dictatorship. Over the next 4 years, he and his administration committed various human rights violations and carried out what is now known as the Cambodian Genocide. To go into more detail, Pol Pot and his administration:
• Forced the Cambodian population to work without pay.
• Made the Cambodian population live in the country side by forceful removing them from their homes in the cites.
• Destroyed Cambodia’s legal system and replaced it with re-education and interrogation centers. If they thought that you were guilty, you would have been very hard pressed to convince them otherwise.
• Caused much of the Cambodian populace to starve, many times to death.
• Killed anyone they either felt didn’t fit into their new society or deemed to even slightly be a threat to their regime. these included: people with connections to the previous government, Doctors, Lawyers, Intellectuals, Journalists, Business Leaders, Vietnamese Cambodians, Chinese Cambodians, Thai Cambodians, Christian Cambodians, Cham Muslims and family members of prisoners who were thought to be a threat to the regime. Even wearing glasses or being able to speak multiple languages could get you killed.
• If you were to be executed (which was very likely), you would have been taken to one the various “Killing Fields” and would most likely be killed with a pickaxe, so that they did not waste any bullets.
By the time they were overthrown during a Vietnamese invasion, the Cambodian life expectancy was about 18 years old.
As bad as rulers such as Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin and Mao Zedong were for their people, I believe no one was as brutal as Pol Pot was.
I feel like their motto put it best:
To spare you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss.
This doesn’t qualify as disgusting, but many years ago, I was involved with an Internet startup. They spent all of their time having meetings which achieved nothing, and were a complete waste of everybody’s time. One day, I was asked, no told, by the CEO to prepare a lengthy report on something that I considered ridiculous. I wrote 3 pages of it, and then decided to see what would happen if I didn’t finish it off, so I added 35 more pages of Loren Ipsum (Latin), and handed the report in. At the next meeting when everybody was present, I made a point of asking the CEO if the report was what he had wanted. He said “Yes, it was great”. I stood up, and told the entire room that this very important report that I had handed in, and which the CEO thought was great, actually contained 35 pages of Latin, proving that he hadn’t actually looked at it. I said “I quit”, and walked out of the door. The company went belly up 6 months later.
I don’t know if it was disgusting, but it was rather a unique trick. I used this a couple of times on drug dealers.
When I worked undercover in narcotics I would be asked to buy street-dealer weight in either cocaine or Heroin. The designer drugs weren’t around yet and this new stuff called crack was just making its way onto the market.
One problem every undercover faced was the hand to hand delivery of the drugs. During the actual purchase, you needed to be able to testify that you gave the money directly to the seller and they directly handed you the drugs. ( AKA hand to hand purchase).
Drug dealers were wise to this. When an informant would introduce me to the seller they would take the money but they would only give the drugs to the informant and not to me directly.
I couldn’t testify that I got the drugs from the informant. That would require me to identify the informant and have them testify. No way I would do that. So I came up with a cool little trick.
I would give the dealer the money and he would pass the drugs off to the informant who gave them to me. I would look at the package and say it was light (not the correct weight) and throw the package back directly to the dealer saying I wanted my money back. Drug dealers are not in the business of giving out refunds.
I’d move in close seemingly to get my money back, but we’d talk a little and I would agree to the light package if he would agree the next package would be a little overweight.
As soon as the dealer agreed, I’d reach out and take the package back directly from the dealer, sometimes almost pulling it out of his hands, thus completing a hand to hand transaction.
We would let the case sit for six months before we made the arrest, so they would not remember what informant walked me in. But my little hand to hand trick worked every time.
What is the craziest military tactic ever used?
Viewer discretion is advised… Imagine you’ve time travelled back to the 7th July 1944, and you’re now a squad leader on the island of Saipan in the Mariana Islands with the 105th Infantry Regiment of the US Army. As your cutting around giving the ‘grunts’ on the .30 cal Browing machine-gun their ‘arcs of fire,’ suddenly, multiple blood-curdling screams across the battlefield could be heard – BANZAIIIIII!!!!!
The Japanese have just launched a massive banzai charge, leading from the front are their officers, brandishing their samurai swords. Just behind the officers are thousands of Japanese soldiers with bayonets fixed, and as the sun glints down on the cold steel you feel the sweat beads across the forehead form. You lift your helmet and wipe the sweat with your sleeve as you wait for them to get in range. . . you wait. . . and wait. . . RAPID FIRE!!!
Your M1 Garand’s barrel is glowing red, the .30 cal is clattering away bursting your eardrums. As one of the enemy Japanese soldiers falls another one takes his place. They have now broken into your position and the hand-to-hand fighting is fierce. . . all of a sudden you’ve been brought back to the present, you don’t know why, but grateful that you’re now safe. . . I’ve dramatized, but I want to try to put you into the same position (‘foxhole’) as the defenders.
The Battle of Saipan and the US forces had pushed the Japanese back so far they had nowhere to go by 6th July, so the commander of the Japanese forces Yoshitsugu Saitõ made plans for a final suicide banzai charge for his soldiers and the civilians on the island. Saitõ said:
“There is no longer any distinction between civilians and troops. It would be better for them to join in the attack with bamboo spears than be captured.”
Why the Japanese soldier didn’t believe in surrender, was because they believed in the code of ‘Bushido’ the samurai code of conduct:
Honour was a samurai’s life. Upholding one’s honour through suicide was regarded as a virtue. Loss of face was regarded as an insult that had to be avenged. Surrender was unforgivable sin that resulted in exclusion from civilized society. Dying in battle is what a samurai aspired to achieve.
The Japanese would try to swarm the enemy in a mass frontal attack which the allies called a banzai charge. This was shortened from, Tennõheika Banzai “Long live His Majesty the Emperor.” This tactic was classed as an honourable suicide which was against well organised, dug-in troops with machine guns and artillery support.
The American soldiers/marines who fought at the Battle of Saipan were some brave men, they had “balls of steel.” This is what Wilfried ‘Spike’ Mailloux of the 105th Regiment facing the Japanese Banzai charge at Saipan, said:
“I was scared as hell,” said Mailloux, then a 20-year-old corporal from Cohoes, a mill town north of Albany. “When you hear that screaming — ‘banzai’ — who wouldn’t be?”
To me, the Japanese soldier’s banzai change of World War 2 was the craziest military tactics used.
JEFFREY SACHS FULL INTERVIEW ABOUT CHINA – U.S RIVALRY CONTINUE ? AND MORE
Oh my God. A deep madness.
Subtle Change in Ukraine Blame Means Deadly Trouble for Americans
OPINION-EDITORIAL — A very subtle change in the words coming out of the Russian Foreign Ministry signals the FINAL step before the annihilation of the United States. We have now reached the final step . . .
The wording used by the Russian Foreign Ministry was very subtle, but its implications are anything but. See if you can pick-up the subtle change in this excerpt from RT:
The US and its citizens are complicit in the deaths of the Ukrainian POWs who were killed last week when the Russian Il-76 military aircraft transporting them was shot down by Kiev’s troops, Moscow’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, has said.
On Thursday, Russia’s Investigative Committee released a report stating that the cargo plane was destroyed using two US-made MIM-104A missiles fired by a Patriot air-defense system. The Il-76 came down in Russia’s Belgorod Region last Wednesday. All of those on board – 65 Ukrainian POWs, three Russian troops, and six crew members – were killed.
Russian investigators stated that Ukrainian troops fired the missiles from a staging area in Kharkov Region, not far from the village of Liptsy, some 10km from the Russian border. They based their conclusion on 116 missile fragments found at the crash site bearing inscriptions in English.
Responding to the report, Zakharova said in a Telegram post that US citizens “need to know where their money is going,” arguing that President Joe Biden and his administration have made Americans “complicit in a bloody tragedy.”
Did you catch it? Did you pick up the subtle change in the language they used? It’s right there in front of you!
Here, let me focus it for you:
“The US and its citizens are complicit in the deaths of the Ukrainian POWs . . .”
Then again, in a later paragraph:
” . . .arguing that President Joe Biden and his administration have made Americans “complicit in a bloody tragedy.” “”
This tiny and subtle change points the finger not just at the US Government, it also points the finger at . . . . YOU. And me! Individually. Personally.
This is a point I have made repeatedly on my radio shows in the past two years. I have earnestly pointed out that what our GOVERNMENT does, is being done IN OUR NAME.
Remember, this nation celebrates Abraham Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address wherein he posited that we have “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
Ergo, when the US Government does something, it does it in OUR name. You and me.
The Russians have now made clear who it is they hold responsible for what the US Government is doing: YOU and ME.
You see, we . . . . you and me . . . . ARE in fact, to blame!
We sit back and do nothing while our government runs roughshod over the whole world. Sanctions on this one and that one. Military action here. Military action there. And whenever our Government engage in that activity, people we don’t know, in lands we’ve never been to or maybe haven’t even heard of . . . . die.
Oh, and while our government is doing all this crap to people all over the world, you and I sit back and do . . . . nothing. We don’t make a phone call to our members of Congress or the Senate. We don’t write a letter or send a fax. We don’t even fire-off an email. We sit on our asses and do absolutely . . . . nothing.
The Russians are now making clear it is YOU and I who are doing this. YOU and I who are to blame. Directly. Personally.
You know what? They’re right.
WE are to blame. We elect these people then sit back and tacitly approve of what they’re doing by our own, personal inaction. They slaughter people all over the world. They bomb countries back into the Stone Age. You and I sit back and do absolutely nothing. Or worse, we sing idiotic Beach Boys Parody songs like “Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran . . . .” as if somehow what we’re doing is good. It isn’t.
A Russian guy I know cited US Senator Lindsey Graham the other day to make a very valid point to me. He showed me what Lindsey Graham, posted on “X” (formerly Twitter) wherein he said the following:
Then the Russian guy asked me “What if some member of the Russian Federation COuncil (i.e. a Russian “Senator”) Posted this exact message on VKontake (Russian Social Media) only changed the countries involved, like this FAKE SAMPLE:
FAKE RUSSIA SENATOR
In case the Putin Administration is wondering, it is abundantly clear to the United States and everyone else in the region, that the Administration doesn’t want war. But it will be difficult to tell the families of the fallen soldiers that the United States is not at war with us.
The United States is at war with Russia on multiple fronts through their proxies (Ukraine). Weak talk and weak action are putting our service members [in Ukraine], at risk. If the United States doesn’t pay a heavy price after the deaths of our service members, and the wounding of many more, then the Putin Administration is derelict in their duties to protect Russian personnel in harm’s way.
To the Putin Administration: Stop the weak rhetoric and respond with strength to protect Russian interests and lives. Your current approach to United States/NATO aggression is not working. Change while you can.”
Same words as Lindsey Graham. Same logic.
So I have to ask YOU, the Reader, if Lindsey Grahams words about Iran are good enough to warrant the US attacking Iran, would the FAKE Russian Senator’s exact same words about Ukraine, justify Russia hitting us?
Why not. Same situation!
You see, this is a big problem for my fellow Americans. We view the world as being ours to do with as we please. We never once stop to think how other powerful nations, might decide to use OUR logic, when dealing with . . . . us.
Now, some of you will react by saying “They wouldn’t dare.” Oh no? Why not?
And you would respond “Because we would nuke the living shit out of them.”
Really?
Because they can also do that to us.
Oh.
Yes.
Reality sets in.
And those same reactionary Americans who would say “They wouldn’t dare” would then likely say “They won’t, it would mean the end of the world.”
Yes. It would. And we would have done it to ourselves by the way we are behaving around the world.
Why should Russia sit back and allow us to supply arms to Ukraine, which are now clearly being used to kill Russians?
Why shouldn’t Russia tell the United States (again) to stop supplying weapons that are killing Russians and then add, or Russia will start hitting the United States?
Why shouldn’t Russia make it direct? Blunt?
Well . . . . turns out, they just began making it blunt. At the top of this Op-Ed, they have now begun blaming “American citizens.” You and me.
Where is this leading? Let me explain it this way:
What is the difference between “Killing” and “murder?”
Murder is the unlawful killing of an innocent. But “Killing” is allowable if it is “justified.”
For instance, if a guy is aiming a gun at you, and you do something which kills him, that is “self defense” and not murder, even though the guy is now dead.
So there is a difference between killing and murder. One may be allowed while the other is not.
Same thing with countries.
The U.S. is supplying weapons for Ukraine to use to kill Russians. Russia has repeatedly told the US and NATO to stop, but we are not stopping. ERGO, it would be “justified” for Russia to kill us in self defense.
Thankfully, the Russians have good morals and they know that perhaps the innocent American people ought not be harmed because of our evil government. SO thus far, they have not killed us.
I think the change in Russian Foreign Ministry wording mentioned at the start of this Op-Ed, tells us that’s about to change.
The official Diplomatic Corps of the Russian Federation is now openly, and publicly, laying the blame for the deaths of Russians, upon “the American people.” Me and you.
Having repeatedly told us to stop, the only thing left for Russia to do is to make us stop – by killing us.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has now begun laying the historical groundwork to justify exactly that.
By changing their statements to lay blame upon “the American people” they are building a record to justify killing . . . us.
Wise-up folks.
Unless we reign-in our wayward government, and stop them from running roughshod over the whole world, you and I __can__ be held accountable. You and I __can__ be stopped.
The clock seems to be ticking.
Now, you can either step up and start being an active and engaged citizen, and start telling your elected public servants to knock it off, or you can go right back to sitting on your ass and doing nothing until the brilliant white flashes start. Then you can feel sorry for yourself as you vaporize, except God already knows: You brought this on yourself by not getting off your lazy ass and stopping your own government while you still could.
No pity for you and me.
FEARFUL EUROPE! Europe Slows down De-Risking from China
I had my fairly new license and was driving my parents car when a deer darted out in front of me. I swerved and put the car into a ditch. Not hurt.
I find a phone and call a tow truck. Get back to the car and there is a police car there. I explained I’d stayed with the car for 15 minutes but knew there was a gas station nearby.
He gives me a ticket for speeding because in his opinion that’s the only way this could have happened.
Now this is a small municipal court for traffic tickets. My license was from my parents home 3 hours away. He was expecting me to just mail in the fine rather than contest it. He approached me before court to “refresh his memory about the event” and naively I did. He gets called and testifies that I was speeding.
So, I asked him where he was when the accident happened and was able to witness me speeding. He said he passed me going in the opposite direction.
So, I asked: if you saw me speeding in the opposite direction & saw me wreck my car, why did I have to walk 20 minutes to the phone, call police headquarters to report the accident, and walk back before you wrote the ticket?
The judge stopped things at that point & dismissed the charges.
This will not go down well with the electorate and, moreover, with the soldiers of the Ukrainian forces:
A poll published by the Kyiv Institute of Sociology in December found 88% of Ukrainians supported the top general. Zelensky’s approval rating, though also high, was considerably lower at 62%.
It is far from clear that any new commander will be able to improve Ukraine’s difficult situation on the battlefield without significantly more forces and weapons — precisely what Zaluzhny has demanded of Zelensky, adding tension to what was already a fraying relationship.
Zaluzhny’s popularity — both within the military and among ordinary citizens — makes his removal a political gamble for Zelensky. It also poses strategic risks at a time when Russia has intensified its attacks and Western security assistance for Kyiv has slowed. The general has built strong rapport with his Western counterparts and has often been able to advocate directly for certain materiel and seek counsel on battlefield strategy. … Both Budanov and Syrsky are considered favorites of Zelensky and Andriy Yermak, the chief of the presidential office and Zelensky’s closest adviser. Nearer the front, however, there seems to be little appetite for change.
“My personal opinion is you can’t do something like this right now — Zaluzhny is someone 80 percent of the military considers a good authority,” said Oleksandr, a battalion commander fighting in eastern Ukraine.
“For what is he being removed? It’s not clear. And who will replace him? Syrsky? God, I hope not. No one in the army likes Syrsky,” Oleksandr added.
The Bild publication writes that Zaluzhny wanted to withdraw troops from Avdiivka a few weeks ago, but Zelensky refused him this and on December 30 he personally went to the city to the front line to support the Ukrainian Armed Forces fighters.
So all the coffins that arrived from near Avdeevka to Ukraine since December 30 are solely on the conscience of Zelensky and his passion for narcissism.
Avdeevka is nearly surrounded and any attempts to hold onto it will cost many valuable lives of soldiers for no discernible advantage. But, just like with Bakhmut, Zelenski wants to hold on to the city to be be able point his western sponsors to some ‘successes’.
My hunch is that, after Monday’s kerfuffle in Kiev, the decision to fire Zaluzny was still hanging in balance.
The change now only happened after the noeconservative destroyer of Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, had landed in Kiev.
When asked by a journalist whether Nuland had learned about Kyiv’s plans on the battlefield, she replied that, in her opinion, Ukraine would achieve great success.
“I have to say that I leave Kyiv tonight more encouraged about the unity and the resolve, about 2024 and its absolute strategic importance for Ukraine. I also leave more confident that, even as Ukraine strengthens its defenses, Mr. Putin is going to get some nice surprises on the battlefield and that Ukraine will make some very strong success,” the U.S. Under Secretary of State emphasized.
This hint does not foresee success on the ground but asymmetric operations within Russia or the Black Sea. More to the like of this which has happen last night:
Ukraine sinks Russian ship.
During a night attack by drones in the Donuzlav area, the Black Sea Fleet lost the Ivanovets MRK, built in 1989, 493 tons of displacement, armed with Moskit missiles.
Sinking that ship will do nothing to change the outcome at the battlefront. Nor would any attacks on Russia oil and gas infrastructure change anything.
Nuland’s remark also hints that the replacement of General Zaluzny will not come in the form of Army General Alexander Syrski, who is disliked by the troops for unsuccessfully holding grounds in Bakhmut and elsewhere at too high costs in men and material.
Nuland’s hint towards asymmetric operations points to the elevation of the Chief of Military Intelligence Directorate Major-General Kyrylo Budanov as a incoming replacement for Zaluzny.
Budanov has been responsible for some daring, if mostly unsuccessful, terror attacks on Russian land and interests.
Back in June 2023 the Economist explained why Zelenski might seek to elevate Bundanov:
Aides huddle close when the general speaks. Under his leadership, Ukraine’s main directorate of intelligence—HUR—has become a plucky, autonomous authority that punches above its weight. It resembles a gang. “Before we had managers, now we have a leader,” says one veteran officer. Oleg, an operative who has known General Budanov for decades, speaks approvingly of his ability to infect others with his fervour, comparing him to a snake “hypnotising you before he comes in for the kill. Restrained, measured, never panicked. You do anything he asks.” … As a confidant of the president—those in government call them kindred spirits—General Budanov is understood to be playing an ever-bigger role in behind-the-scenes peace negotiations. Sources say he is a conduit to secret talks with the Chinese, and he has also been in contact with Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of Russia’s mercenary Wagner outfit.
In conversation it is clear that General Budanov has been thinking hard about post-war Ukraine. Last winter there was talk of him becoming defence minister. He insists his only ambition is victory. Yet secret polls conducted by Mr Zelensky’s office show they are thinking about using the cult of their hero spymaster to counterbalance a perceived rivalry emanating from Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s likeable and independent commander-in-chief. General Budanov’s colleagues say they are convinced he is destined for a big political role once peace comes—if he lives that long.
To the TV producers (Yermak) around the former comedian actor Zelenski it is all about ratings.
Budanov may be good at marketing his image as a successful terrorist.
But he has zero experience of leading any size of unit in combat. You can not lead a company, battalion, brigade or army by ‘huddling close’ with aides. It needs long term strategic thinking just as detailed attention to all kinds of day to day logistics.
Leading an army is like conducting a huge orchestra through a four year long Wagner epos. Having played the first fiddle in a chamber quartet does not qualify for that.
I am sure that U.S. military is not happy about this move. While there were some disagreements with Zaluzny about the right strategies those were between military professional who allowed for diverting opinions. Zaluzny was seen as an experienced professional soldier. Budanov is seen as a spook who had never been in command of any real military. He well not be talked to at the same level.
According to one source, Zaluzhnyi’s senior staff are also expected to be removed from their positions.
With the new inexperienced leadership the situation on the ground will soon become a catastrophic mess for forces of Ukraine. There will be wrong priorities, miss-allocations of resources and large scale losses of men and ground.
On the other side terror attacks on Russian targets, industrial equipment as well as population centers, are likely to sharply increase.
The larger U.S. aim of all this, first announced as a 2019 RAND study, is still unchanged:
The study at that time recommended the arming of Ukrainian’s army as the best way to unbalance Russia. We have since seen the escalation of that strategy. The move from the battlefield to the realm of terror is a response to the degradation of the first by empathizing the psychological effects of the second.
The foreseeable outcome though is unchanged. Ukraine will be smashed, Russia’s power will increase and the global view of the U.S. as a reliable partner will be diminished.
Posted by b on February 1, 2024 at 14:48 UTC | Permalink
I exposed a huge scam by my local gas distributor (cooking gas).
This is a typical cooking gas cylinder in India.
As you can see (not very clearly though), on the neck of the cylinder, net weight and gross weight are clearly mentioned.
Recently, I read an article in ‘The Hindu’ that revealed that a lot of gas agencies/distributors/delivery persons in India are stealing cooking gas. They take out about 1–2 kg of gas from each cylinder and sell it separately in black. The loss in weight is too small for an unsuspecting buyer to notice. But in terms of money, this translates into a loss of about 60 INR per cylinder. The article cautioned everybody to get their gas cylinders weighed before paying the delivery person (Delivery persons are mandated to carry a portable weighing scale along with them by the Govt.)
At first I laughed it off. My agency was trusted. It would never do that. But then on a whim, I decided to try it out. When the next cylinder was delivered to my home, I casually asked the delivery boy to weigh it. The color on his face instantly changed. He started stammering, started insisting that there was no need for this because the bond of trust we shared! I immediately grew suspicious. I pressed him. He then started making excuses that he forgot to bring along his portable weighing-scale.
Luckily, I had my own weighing scale at home. I immediately brought it out and weighed the cylinder myself. The gross weight printed on the cylinder was 29.5 kg, whereas the scale read 27 kg. A difference of bloody 2.5 kgs.
The delivery boy started begging me not to register a complaint against him. And that he wouldn’t repeat the mistake ever again.
Apparently, this is a huge scam going on all over India. If you are reading this answer, please get your gas cylinder duly weighed before paying for it.
Not exactly fired, but we thought it was a great reaction.
After a recent merger between two rather large companies, it was necessary to reduce personnel, so each department was asked to cut staffing by a certain percentage.
To encourage volunteers, management offered to give a full week worth of salary and paid medical benefits for each full year a person had worked at the company if they took early retirement. And anyone who qualified for a pension also got the full pension as if they had not retired early.
One member of our team was about 14 months away from his planned retirement date when he would start receiving full Social Security and pension payments.
He had worked for the company for 45 years. After some simple math, we all strongly encouraged him to take the deal.
He got 45 weeks of full pay, a whole year of benefits coverage (negotiated with HR), his full pension, and they also bought out the almost two months of accrued vacation time that he had been saving up in order to retire a few months early.
He basically got a 12+ month paid vacation with full benefits. We will be having a retirement party for him on his original planned retirement date in a couple of months. 😀
I imagine that wasn’t what management had in mind when they made the offer, but everyone on our team was very happy for him to get it!
The Duran: NATO Crossed Putin’s Red Line and Russia is Ready to FINISH It
Yesterday, I was working with an Orthodox Jewish woman around age 25 on sparring.
Let’s call her Chaya. It was her first day training and I was taking her under my wing to mentor her a bit. (Yes, I have reached the level of being able to slightly teach others. Not much)
Chaya was very sweet, and found it hard to hit. She was so kind and shy, she found it so difficult to get up the anger to hit.
I was holding up the kick shield for her to practice on. (For those who don’t know, this but with punching)
She wasn’t hitting the body shield bag hard enough. She just couldn’t summon the anger needed. She kept giggling and being very gentle and kind.
I tried to rile her up. “Come on, Chaya. Imagine the teacher you hate most? Imagine being cut off in traffic? Imagine your air conditioner breaking on the Shabbat.”
Nothing. She just had no anger.
So I had to be a ***** and I knew exactly what to say. So I said “Imirtza Hashem by you, dear. Have you tried being less picky?” Which means “With God’s help by you,” in reference that she needs divine assistance to find a partner, something Jewish singles (especially female) hear ALL THE TIME AND IT DRIVES US ALL CRAZY! It’s condescending, it’s shaming and it’s really salt in our wounds. And we hear it from well meaning busy bodies all the time.
Chaya’s eyes narrowed and her jaw tightened with sheer rage. She punched the bag so hard, I was knocked back several steps. “See, I knew you had that in you,” I said triumphantly. “Now, you know you can punch.”
She delightedly thanked me and we exchanged worst date stories.
Sometimes, you just need some motivation and if it takes using evil, so be it.
No. But may I highlight a dirty trick by a phone soliciter?
I’ll take that as a yes.
A neighbor of mine was a saleman for Sam’s Club. The guy who makes a pitch to your boss, offering a discount to any of his/her employees who’d like the group membership, put on sales presentations at state fairs etc., cold-calling as well.
Then I moved halfway across the state. He calls me one afternoon, disguising his voice and acting as if he’s calling on behalf of some worthless telemarketing offer. Of course I, not recognizing him, utter some choice words before hanging up. He calls me right back, identifies himself and proceeds to ask me why I couldn’t be more polite in declining whatever it is that’s being offered.
I told him why. Said my peace and then we chatted about whatever he had really needed to talk to me about.
Many years ago I was in a chat room of a group with hundreds of members. Predominantly adults but, there were older teens. I don’t remember what was being discussed but, this kid (older teen) started making rude comments then started making bizarre comments about school shootings,violence and basically hinting he was going to do something. Quite a few people ignored it or told him he was being inappropriate and that he would be reported to moderator. Most in the discussion didn’t take it seriously. I went to his profile which fortunately wasn’t locked down. So concerning posts and was able to figure out the state, town and high school he attended. And his actual name. So I called the police in that town. Explained what I had seen, sent screenshots etc. While I was on the phone with a detective they got a call from one other man who had done the same as me. Surprisingly, the detective called me back a few hours later and while he didn’t give me many details he did say, that between myself and the other man they were able to locate the boy and that everyone was safe. I confess to stalking the FB profiles later and saw that he had been hospitalized so hopefully he got the help he needed. I worried I was doing the wrong thing but, I just kept thinking how hard it would be to live with myself if I saw news the next day of a school shooting and HADN’T called.
Candies in a box
“I know that I have less to live than I have lived.
I feel like a child who was given a box of chocolates. He enjoys eating it, and when he sees that there is not much left, he starts to eat them with a special taste.
I have no time for endless lectures on public laws – nothing will change. And there is no desire to argue with fools who do not act according to their age. And there’s no time to battle the gray. I don’t attend meetings where egos are inflated and I can’t stand manipulators.
I am disturbed by envious people who try to vilify the most capable to grab their positions, talents and achievements.
I have too little time to discuss headlines – my soul is in a hurry.
Too few candies left in the box.
I’m interested in human people. People who laugh at their mistakes are those who are successful, who understand their calling and don’t hide from responsibility. Who defends human dignity and wants to be on the side of truth, justice, righteousness. This is what living is for.
I want to surround myself with people who know how to touch the hearts of others. Who, through the blows of fate, was able to rise and maintain the softness of the soul.
Yes, I hustle, I hustle to live with the intensity that only maturity can give. I’ll eat all the candy I have left – they’ll taste better than the ones I already ate.
My goal is to reach the end in harmony with myself, my loved ones and my conscience.
I thought I had two lives, but it turned out to be only one, and it needs to be lived with dignity.”
Brilliant Anthony Hopkins
and free interpretation of Mario de Andrade’s poem
We had a dishwasher that wouldn’t latch, darn thing wasn’t more than 20, 24 months old. Called the repair guy. He “fixed” it, I paid the bill and off he goes. Well the darn thing starts leaking about two days later from the middle of the door at the bottom. So he comes back, takes the front of the door off. I can see the paths of the water leak from the “newly replaced latch” all the way down the insulation ( soaked by the way) to the spot where it leaked onto the floor. He informs me that we need a new door, over $450, we only paid $560 for it. So I informed him I wasn’t paying for a door, the latch was obviously installed wrong. Oh non, says he, the latch is fine. Oh no, say I, you broke it I’m not buying anything. So he leaves. I call the repair business office, they send a higher up, supervisor or some such ro lookat it. I show him the paper work, he looks at the machine and, Lo and behold the latch is incorrectly installed and the door needs to be replaced. New door for free, and no labor charge. He even refunded the work for the latch.
The greatest threat to the U.S. is your mostly brain dead population created as a result of 75 years of U.S. media propaganda and spin by the US media to glorify the U.S. and demonised those that refused to be submissive and subservient to them.
I have been a business mechanic of sort for years on end till my retirement, and in my view, the first part of any change is recognition and acceptance of the need to change! In the case of the U.S. you guys don’t even know you are in life support and that your U.S. economy is one humongous Ponzi scheme!
There lies the US problem. If you don’t want to know that you are haemorrhaging cash due to forever wars and you cannot afford your defence spending. If you refuse to accept that Chinas has lapped you guys! You ain’t gonna fix it! There lies your problem. Americans must be the most ignorant and naive people on planet earth! You media has made all of you believe in your so call “exceptionalism”
You still think Chinese lives in caves with bats and Russians are Slavic underachievers! And you are 10 foot tall genius! Many here in QUORA still thinks we are in 1945 when the 2 world wars ravaged all other major powers! And the U.S. share of world economy is 52%.
China and Russia don’t need to lift a finger, Americans will implode the U.S!
Please note that the antonym for Democracy is not Communism. It is Dictatorship. There is no logical contradiction between communism and democracy, as many in the US seem to believe. It is a ridiculous, gross misconception.
Is America a true democracy? In my opinion, there is no true democracy or true dictatorship in this world. Every country lies somewhere on a continuous spectrum between these two extremes. If America were a true and pure democracy, I should be able to look into Trump’s tax records and no one could stop me. Note I am not criticizing the American system, but only saying that you cannot call it a true and pure democracy in the sense of the word. It is just closer to the democratic end of the spectrum than some other countries.
I am from Taiwan, not China. I have not lived a single day under communism, but I have lived many years under an anti-communist dictatorship, and that was BAD. You cannot equate democracy with anti-communism. It is simply wrong.
It is very strange to me that communism is such a dirty word in the supposedly free and open-minded American public psyche, as if it were some kind of voodoo witchcraft. I find it totally anti-intellectual and closed-minded, not worthy of a true and free democracy.
I lived in a townhouse with one shared wall. When I moved in, the neighbors were a very quiet couple, never heard a peep out of them. They moved out a year later – and 3 single male construction workers moved in. They played obnoxiously loud music at all hours of the day and night. Complicating matters – I had a 3 year old, and was pregnant with my second child. So sleep was a need.
My wusband (nicer than saying ex-husband because he WAS my husband at the time) politely went next door to ask them to turn down the music – several times. It got to where they wouldn’t answer the door when he went over there. We called the police several times – and they wouldn’t answer the door for the police either.
The situation was wretched – and I began looking for ways to get the message across. One night – they left their garage door open during a particularly loud jam session. I had already gone to bed, and was wearing a huge maternity nightgown – because – I was hugely pregnant. I quickly snuck into their garage, and flipped the breaker switch. And scurried back to my side of the townhouse quietly. They figured it out the next morning. And did their party thing the next night – and I repeated the process. After that they left the garage door shut.
Around this time, I had the baby I was expecting. My wusband and I decided to take the kids and visit a friend for a few hours on a Saturday when we knew all of the neighbors were home sleeping off their Friday night party. Before we left, we moved both of the stereo speakers over to the shared wall, and turned on some super loud heavy metal music to share with said neighbors. And left. We did this several more weekends.
The construction workers broke their lease and left a couple of months later.
Many years ago I had a strange neighbor that lived with his mother next door. I did not speak with them but I would wave if I saw them to be polite.
A few years later I had fallen asleep on the couch and heard this weird noise by the window like scratching. I thought it was my cat and started checking, I see the screen going up in the window and two arms, I started screaming get the f*** out of here and slammed down the storm window.
I woke my son up and called the police, unfortunately my description was two arms of a Caucasian male. This was in the country so not a lot of people around. Four police cars later and after getting my story they went next door. I figured they were asking if they saw anything, but no they were hauling out the guy next door. They found him hiding under a car in the garage. They told me they knew this guy and he had been in trouble before. He had actually broken into my house when the people before me lived there. That would have been good to know before…
So we go to court and you can tell this guy is not right in his mind when he talks to the judge stating he doesn’t understand: so after my victim impact statement, they hold him over but say I can go but not to worry he will not be back.
I do not know what happened but he was back two weeks later and now I have to live next to this guy.
All I could think of was this, my neighbor he knows when I am home or at work so what exactly were his motives to break in knowing we were home? Scared me to death and I had two kids to think about (my daughter was not home the night this happened luckily).
So I called my brother and he came over with a shotgun to teach me target practice. I printed off pictures of this guys mugshot to use for target practice in my backyard. When I was done, I posted them around my property so he would get the message…
Not sneaky but hopefully scared him off. I never had trouble for the next year I lived there but I also never leave a window or door unlocked at night either. Even in the summer months.
Luckily I have much nicer neighbors now and a much better gun to protect myself with if the need arises.
Opening Incredible Garage-Found Gun Safes After 8 Years | What Will We Find Inside?!
Update 4/12/17- Many, many folks have asked me to identify the hotel chain. It was a Hyatt!
I was on a road trip and needed to stay overnight suddenly because a fast moving snow storm was blowing in.
I could see the logo of a hotel chain I occasionally use a few blocks away. I called them and asked if I could have a room on short notice? No problem. Note that between the time I called and the time I appeared at the front desk was maybe 20 minutes!
Here is a portion of my front desk (FD) conversation-
FD- “Mr. B. thank you for staying with us on such short notice. I see you have our affinity card so you have a room on our priority floor. Please remember that we have complimentary coffee and breakfast on that floor beginning at 6:00 am.”
Me- “Thanks but I’m leaving early tomorrow and I’ll be gone by 5:00 am.”
FD- “I understand Mr. B. Have nice night.”
So I trundled up to my room and there on the desk was a small pitcher of ice cold milk and three fresh chocolate chip cookies along with a note. The note was handwritten and addressed specifically to me and thanked me for staying on such short notice. It was signed by the manager. I was very impressed but the best was yet to come!
The next morning my alarm went off at 4:30 am as I planned on leaving at 5:00 am. The message light on my room telephone was blinking but the phone never rang! Of course that would have disturbed me.
The message was something like this-
“Good morning Mr. B. We noted that you were leaving early this morning and couldn’t take advantage of the amenities on our priority floor. We took the liberty of placing coffee and breakfast pastries outside of your door. We didn’t know if you preferred regular or decaffeinated coffee so we included a carafe of each. Have a safe trip!”
You know guys, sometimes I get the biggest belly-laugh when I read some of the answers here. Either they are terribly deluded, or they are immensely ignorant.
…
Here’s a REAL answer.
First of all, let’s throw out some FACTS to “set the table”, so to speak.
China has the largest Navy in the world.
China’s navy is not spread out all over the place (like the USN), but are concentrated at the projected battle fields.
China’s navy is also the oldest navy in the world. It was operating CENTURIES before the first organized navy in Europe.
China’s navy has been restructured, and operates NEW ships with cutting-leading-edge systems and technology. Many of which are unique and unknown to the West.
Were a war to occur between the USA and China, a Naval war would be the lest of the worries of the American “leadership”. Economic, social, and financial collapse would all be in free-fall.
But, let’s answer this question.
Can the United States Navy sink the Chinese Navy?
Here’s my answer…
Yes, the USN has the ability to destroy vessels, aircraft, bases, and people of the PLAN.
It is highly unlikely, however, that they will be able to completely destroy the PLAN.
It is likely that in the process of this destruction, that the USN would suffer great losses in men, material, weapons, and vessels.
Both sides will likely take great losses.
But this is 2024. China’s city-destroying munition capabilities are global. The consequence of a United States (or proxy) war against China will result in the people of the attacking nation being hurt.
Thus…
American major cities will also become targets for destruction.
…
Remember, boys and girls, China is a peaceful nation…
…until it isn’t.
…
Never forget the great losses that the United States incurred the last time they fought the Chinese.
Look at the BIG PICTURE. Not the tactical issues, but the strategic issues. Then faced with this reality, project the highest probability outcomes.
They are not pretty.
JUST NOW…States Under Attack NEED National Guard Deployed IMMEDIATELY
Modern architecture in Nigeria is built with total convenience in mind. We have more toilets and bathrooms in our houses than bedrooms. I’ve built two myself, although not opulent in any way, but it was unthinkable to construct a four-bedroom home with just one or two bathrooms.
When I travel and hear people or real estate agents in developed countries boast about their six-bedroom houses with two baths, the Nigerian in me can’t help but feel puzzled. In Nigeria, such a setup would be considered ridiculous.
I understand that building in developing countries like Nigeria is quite cheap, but just how much extra is it going to cost for a decent bathroom in every bedroom?
The unwritten standard amongst Nigerians is that each bedroom must come with its ensuite bathroom, just like a hotel, ensuring privacy and convenience. Additionally, there’s always a separate toilet for guests by the living room.
This practice in Nigeria also stems from practicality. With sometimes large families, the idea of waiting in line for a bathroom in your home seems absurd. To think that one would have to walk the entire hallway to get to the toilet, especially at night. This is unimaginable in a home with several boyfriends and girlfriends.:D
Our homes are designed to ensure that everyone has their own space, minimizing inconvenience and maximizing comfort. Building a bedroom without a space for a toilet, accessible only from the same bedroom is a great disservice to whoever is to occupy that room.
While mostly rich folks opt for homes with extensive bathrooms in developed countries, it’s intriguing to note that such a luxury, sometimes at a lower standard is a standard feature in a modern Nigerian building.
P.S.
In the comment section, some people have shifted focus to Nigeria’s poverty, rather than discussing architecture. About 23% of Nigerians, over 50 million people, belong to the middle-upper class, and many in this category can still afford to build their homes. This number alone is more than the population of many rich countries. Nigeria is a land of both immense wealth and poverty. If you’re looking for stories about poverty in Nigeria today, you’ll have to keep scrolling or better still, write it yourself! This post focuses on the architectural styles prevalent among Nigerians who have the means to build their own homes based on my observations!
Poverty is a real problem in Nigeria and it’s getting worse, but there is so much wealth in Nigeria too. Sadly, talking about Nigeria’s poverty and scams is more acceptable and beneficial to many westerners that we can’t even talk about anything else without backlash.
Oh, boy, did I! My mother still blames him for my hatred of math 35 years later!
I had an Algebra teacher get it in his head that A students will always get an A, B students will always get a B, etc, regardless of the grading scale. If and A was 90-100%, A students will do the work to get above 90%, and if an A is 95-100%, we would do the work to get a 95%, etc.
So he decided to make his grading scale A= 98–100%, B= 95–97%, C= 92–94%, D= 90–91‰, below 90% is and F.
So what had been an A/B student (me) would instead fail. Yeah, we hated him. And it only took 1 semester to get him onto probation, and he was gone after the second semester.
He really screwed up by doing this to my class. Out of 52 kids in my graduating class, almost 10% were teacher’s kids, plus one was the principal’s kid! In rural Wisconsin, many normal kids had parents that were uninterested in grades or intimidated by teachers, but when the parents ARE the teachers and principal, that factor disappeared, and they had no problem pitching an absolute FIT until it was fixed.
But I still hate math, the damage was already done.
Papa Vento’s Sicilian Chicken
Like Chicken Parmesan, my father made this for us all the time while we were growing up.
Ingredients
6 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1/2 cup olive oil (+ more for frying)
1 1/4 cup dry breadcrumbs
1/2 cup Parmesan
Ground black pepper
6 large slices mozzarella cheese
1 large can (32 ounces) crushed tomatoes (regular or Italian seasoned)
1 medium onion
Instructions
Pound out chicken breasts between wax paper to 1/2-inch thick.
In a shallow bowl, combine breadcrumbs and parmesan cheese. In another shallow bowl, pour 1/2 cup olive oil.
Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Dip chicken breasts first in olive oil, letting excess drip off, and then press into breadcrumb mixture. Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil in a large skillet over medium / low heat. Sauté chicken breasts until golden on both sides.
Arrange chicken breasts on bottom of a 9 x 13-inch baking dish. Pour crushed tomatoes evenly over chicken. Halve the onion and “sliver” cut it, sprinkling them on top of the tomatoes (quantity depends on your taste ). Lay 1 piece of cheese over each chicken breast and bake for 30 minutes until cheese starts to turn golden and sauce is bubbly.
My father makes this with pounded round steak and non-seasoned tomatoes but we love this version. You can make it either way and make up your own mind.
When I was born my parents lived in a flat (apartment ) in quite a rundown area as they were struggling to make ends meet.
My Dad worked 12 hour nights and came home to my mum in floods of tears. Shed been cooking a curry and the “skinheads” on the next floor didn’t appreciate the cross cultural culinary efforts that my mum was whipping up.
They kicked and banged at the door screaming “it stinks of f***ing P***s in here” and other derogatory and racist remarks. All while knowing full well there was a young mother and baby inside.
My Dad came home, and after mum told him what had happened, he decided to visit the chap upstairs.
Knocking was done via my Dad’s shoulder on the flimsy little Yale lock (Dad was a rugby player, Prop to be exact!) and upon entering the was confronted with the offender, in his underpants, swinging a mase at him. Dad kindly removed the offensive weapon from him and told him what a silly man him and his friends had been. Then, upon exiting, Dad noticed this guy’s new stereo system and it reminded him that he’d also had enough of his crappy music at all sorts of hours.
Dad informed him that “I’ve had e-f***ing-nough of this too” and proceeded to throw the stereo system out of this chaps window, which was obviously shut because Dad wouldn’t waste time like that.
Job done, Dad goes back down stairs to enjoy his curry. Then there’s a knock at the door and matey boy has phoned the police. My Dad was honest and willingly accompanied the officers to the station to attempt to resolve the matter.
Fast forward and it goes to court. Now there’s breaking and entering, GBH, criminal damage and………. burglary. This guy had had the audacity to say Dad had stolen his precious stereo system and, during questioning the Judge asked my Dad “so, do you know the whereabouts of the said stereo system”
My Dad replied “Yes your Honour, with all due respect I believe the stero is still in the f***ing tree”
The courtroom burst into laughter and after the judge reminded my Dad to watch his language, decided to send a constable to investigate my Dad’s claim.
After the proceedings resumed the constable concluded to the court
“Yes Your Honour, it would appear that the stereo system is still in the tree”
I believe the chap upstairs was done for wasting police time and moved not long after.
My Dad has always got plenty of these stories from his younger days and whilst I don’t condone any of his actions, they’re bloody epic!
Chinese penchant for knowledge and continuous improvement means that Chinese will always become smarter that Americans in general. Americans in general are cursed by the perception that they are exceptional. Starting from this premise makes them think they are better and smarter than the rest.
That couldn’t be further from the truth. The U.S. became overwhelmingly strong due to the coincidence of history. The 2 world wars wrecked all the major economies and left the U.S. with one eye but the rest of the world has lost both their eyes! The became the king of the blind.
Confucianism ethics in every Chinese person mean they focus on being educated and learning. They will stop at nothing to give their children the very best education money can buy. Diligence and hard work is among the traits that gives Chinese the edge. This means apart from having a higher and better education that is at least 3 full years ahead of the west, the Chinese race never stop learning.
American has this feeling of entitlement and it thinks the world must be submissive and subservient to them and they can always be the best by hook or by crook. These days mainly by crook! Given any task Chinese will start faster and work harder at it and in the end Chinese will be more successful.
Candice explains why it is important for wives to be monogamous
Chinese lower -cost cars are the result of EV’s and they need batteries which China has the raw materials to make unlike the US so low cost EV’s represent the future of international relations between the trading Nations which has developed into a competition between two trading blocks.
Bipolarism has taken the world by storm BRICS led the way as the Russian Special Operation guaranteed retreat to be forbidden, the World post February 24 – 2022 will never be what it was from 1991 to 2011, I know that end date is not universally accepted it was when Libyan leader Muammar Gadaffi refused to be cowered into submission and took on the British and French Arab Spring which had to be save by Obama coming to their rescue bombing Libya and alienating Russia, Vladimir Putin saw the need to jump into the Presidency again because Demitry Medvedev was too far gone supporting Obama, now Demitry Medvedev is an anti Western hawk compared to Putin, that’s how different things are in Russia today compared to 1991 to 2011.
After 2011 Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad followed in Gadaffi’s footsteps and unlike Muammar Gadaffi the Syrian leader remains alive while military Keynesian economics has conquered the United States of America after getting up to full speed under Obama in 2011, now the US economy is swallowing Europe using the pretext of war with all credible sources pointing to the modern times unprecedented threat coming from the Southern Powers China and Russia which is alarming the US, Britain and EU.
This international predicament developed from the US, British and EU’s 1991 complete victory over the entire political and economic landscape within which China has risen in that 33 years to reflect the exact opposite as the goods arranged on supermarket shelves are coming from China taking the place of Japan as the manufacturing centre of the US, Britain and EU’s operations, on top of that China as part of BRICS is now the largest exporter of cars to what is now becoming known in political and economic narratives’ as the Northern Group associated with the pattern of wealth acquisition in the North American continent and poverty in the Southern American continent.
BRICS represents the South and have gained control over a significant portion of the World’s economic landscape which the Northern Group of Nations the US, Britain and EU can’t afford to allow China’s belt and road initiative becoming the turning point of the Northern Groups 1991 to 2011 political and economic control of World affairs, one way the Government’s of the US, Britain and EU can reign in BRICS as they did Japan is to make China’s products economically non viable by pushing up the prices compared to the competition from other parts of the World that do not challenge the economic dominance of the Northern Group the US, Britain and EU.
Import duty is one way the Northern Group are pushing up the prices of what China has to offer, this Government policy does have limitations as the Northern Group manufacturers become protected and take advantage by pushing up the prices of their cars.
1, In 1991, US pharm industry promoted opioid-related drug by saying opioid is harmless. Doctors could prescibe it to patients & drug stores could sell it. From 1999-2017, 200,000 Americans died from opioid. Purdue Pharma, manufacturer of OxyContin was sued & fined for $8.3 billion in 2020. Purdue is owned by a Jewish American family Sackler.
2, In around 2010, OxyContin was hard to get. People turned to heroin which is cheaper but stronger. It also uses an ingredient from opium. In 2010-14, CDC reported that the death rate due to heroin has risen more than 200% among “white” & African Americans.
3, The 3rd wave is fentanyl which started in 2014. It also contains an ingredient from opium. In Aug 2021-Aug 22, 100,000 Americans died of drug overdose. 2/3 were fentanyl.
Capitalism & politics
In the book “Death of Despair & Future of Capitalism”, economist Anne Case & Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton point out the collusion between pharm capitalists & politicians. Their deep collusion makes it difficult to control drug.
Politicians receive donation from pharm capitalists. Hence politicians will never come up with an effective law to control drug.
British Guardian reported in 2017 that, for the past 10 years, US pharm industry spent $2.5 billion in lobbying politicians. 90% of congress-persons & 97 out of 100 senators received political donations from pharm industry. At least once.
The fight between the 2 political parties is another reason. While both parties swear they would fight drug crisis, no party wants to cooperate with the other to effective beat drug abuse. No party wants the other party to become a hero.
scapegoat
In order to show they have done their part in fentanyl battle, USA blames it on China.
China adopts zero tolerance on illegal drug & is very strict on drug control. China is ahead of United Nations to classify drug into fine categories so as to effectively catch drugs that do not meet the requirement.
Since Sept 2019, US customs has not caught any fentanyl from China. But US politicians keep telling Americans that China exports fentanyl.
In 2023, USA sanctioned a Chinese police unit & lab that inspects for illegal drug. Perhaps USA is upset that China is too strict & US customs did not find any from China.
USA also sanctioned companies that produce LEGAL chemicals & equipment that can make fentanyl. The chemical is legal because, if used properly, it can be used to make pain killer for, say, cancer patients. The equipment is legal because it is a tool to make pills.
US politicians are not serious about solving problems.
Look at poverty: any theft below $950 is not a crime. ie USA encourages open robbery.
When USA loses jobs due to Clinton’s globalisation program, Trump said China steals US jobs.
Instead of curbing gun violence, USA militarizes teachers & babies.
If one day USA collapses, it is the collusion of US politicians & capitalists.
How do you start a business? You must have these two.
Business concept.
Capital.
Do you have a great idea, or you have money to invest, or a little of both?
If you have money, this is the scariest part in China. Because if you are asking on Quora (instead of Chinese social media), you are likely a foreigner who aren’t familiar with Chinese language and society.
Like with any society, it’s not wise to advertise your willingness to spend your money. You are just ringing the dinner bell for scammers, more or less. There will be hundreds of people being very willing to become your best friends.
Isn’t China very safe? Very. But while police can protect you from criminals, police can’t protect you from yourself and your own bad decisions, persuaded by scammers.
If you have a great idea, you may think of ways to safeguard your ideas, trade mark if you can, so the people you pitch your ideas to will not simply steal your ideas and lock you out of any profit.
Chances are there are millions of people in the same boat as you: having great ideas, wanting investors.
What to do to start your dream business in China?
Starting a business requires more commitment than a marriage. You have to be ready to give 200%.
Need money. Unless you are lucky enough to have a financier, you need some initial capital to invest in your idea, to create some kind of a working prototype, to have something for show. This will put you above the millions of people who simply got ideas.
Get to know China.
China is like any society. There are honest people and there are really shady people. You can’t simply see it on their appearance alone.
If you are a lone warrior, your first investment is to live in China, even a few months at a time. Get involved in Chinese daily life, get involved in the industry you want to be in. Find a part time job there?
Or seek out an existing support network you can trust.
If you are Indian, seek out other Indians already working in the industry you want to start business in. They are likely more sympathetic to befriend and show you the rope. They may even find you a job.
But beware, even your own compatriots can scam you, or mislead you. Don’t be too trusting.
This is all I have for a Quora answer.
With only a very vague question, this is all you are going to get. Being an entrepreneur is full of risk. Your first lesson is not to get rich quick, but learn risk management. I rather you lose a few thousands today for a hard lesson, than to lose a few millions 10 years later for this same lesson.
Pro-Tip: Find professional legal consultation for second opinion.
Say you are about to engage in a business deal, whether with local Chinese or your compatriot, secretly go outside to find paid consultation services. They will know Chinese laws and regulations more than anyone. They can smell a fish from miles away. You can’t save money on this.
Pornstar’s ABANDONED Mansion ~ You Won’t Believe What We Found Inside!
Malaysia man’s viral stunt of planting banana tree in pothole gets road repaired within hours
Public works department blame continuous rain as reason behind delay in road maintenance
Frustrated over the authority’s inaction, a Malaysian man planted a banana tree in a pothole on a road to draw attention to the problem.
Mahathir Aripin from Jalan Sandakan-Lahad Datu village in Sabah posted a photo of the banana tree standing almost in the middle of the road on his Facebook page.
The base of the tree was covered with some soil to ensure it stood erect.
He also posted a message expressing his concern for those using the road and humorously suggested he might use tar next time.
“I feel sorry for the road users. I’ll cover it with tar next time,” he said on 29 January.
Seeing the response to his Facebook post, the local authorities responsible for road safety – the Sabah Public Works Department – started work to repair the road.
Reports said the pothole was filled within hours of Mr Aripin bringing attention to it.
The public works department blamed continuous rain as a reason for delay in the road maintenance.
This method of highlighting road repair issues is not unprecedented. There have been cases reported in Kedah in the country, and even in Florida, US.
Mr Aripin’s post sparked a conversation on road conditions in Malaysia.
On social media, several commentators commended his effort to bring attention to the problem of road safety and maintenance.
One jokingly said that he should have planted a durian tree whose fruit is notoriously foul-smelling instead of a banana tree.
Others responded with the laughter emoji while some called his attempt to plant a banana tree in the pothole “naughty”.
The pothole’s location was about 500m from the spot where a recent accident claimed the life of a 4-year-old girl, believed to have been caused by a pothole.
According to Malaysia’s Road Safety Plan 2022-2030, the country aims to reduce road deaths by 50 per cent by 2030.
In police work, there are many things you see that you would rather have not seen. Suicide by firearm seems to be at the top of my list. I only experienced this once in my career.
Sure I have found people a day after the person lost their head, sort of, with the blast from a shotgun — what a mess. It’s very inconsiderate to the family members or even first responders who have to deal with this.
But only once, when I was responding to a call of a man with a gun was I quite close when the shot was fired. I was out of my patrol car with a partner and running up an outside staircase which led to the man’s apartment when we hear the bang. He is sitting on the landing at the top of the stairs with his back against the wall, looking at us. He had a small caliber handgun still in his hand, and the barrel remained in his mouth. He was alive for the moment, but it was apparent he wouldn’t survive.
My partner took out a pair of latex gloves because there was blood, and started to put them on. I didn’t wait for gloves and grabbed the gun with both hands and first peeled his finger off the trigger. I then peeled the rest of his fingers from around the gun and handed it to my partner.
I wasn’t sure how this man felt about the police, but I was going to be sure that he didn’t take one of us with him. The man expired while we were at the scene. There were skull fragments and white and gray brain matter against the wall behind where he was sitting. Even after shooting himself he remained upright and seated.
A crime scene was immediately taped off, and detectives were brought in to investigate. The first unique discovery was that the handgun was fired twice. The first bullet was later found flattened but still in the brain cavity. It must have struck the inside of his skull with sufficient force to fracture it but did not exit. The second bullet was found underneath the man’s body.
Something I learned from detectives that night is that it’s not uncommon for a person considering suicide by handgun to fire a test round to make sure the gun is working properly. The noise from the first shot was reported by a neighbor and drew us to the scene.
Had our arrival hurried this man’s final desperate act? That’s something we will never know. I would have loved to have had the chance to speak with the man and perhaps change his mind. But that wasn’t to be.
I was permitted to enter the man’s home with the detectives and found a neat and well-organized apartment. He had this entire event meticulously planned out.
On the dining room table were a series on neatly organized envelopes lined up in a perfect row. Three were separately addressed to family members, while one was marked Funeral director and last one simply said: Police. Inside the envelope, marked police was a neatly handwritten letter. The first thing I noticed was that the letter was dated with today’s date. The letter explained that he had taken his own life freely. He went on to explain that he suffered from a very painful and debilitating terminal illness which would lead him to a more painful state before his eventual death.
He provided us with the names and contact information for several doctors who were treating him. He also asked us to make sure we contacted the funeral director first, so his family members would not see him in his current state. He went on to ask us to hand-deliver the other letters to his family members and provided their addresses, which were all local. He closed his letter by apologizing to us for any mess his act may have caused.
We next opened the letter to the funeral director, as it was unsealed and only identified with the words funeral director. Again, we found a neatly handwritten letter reminding this funeral director of his pre-paid funeral contract. The letter advised that one of his children had the written agreement. He went on to provide significant detail on his final arrangements, down to the suit in which he wanted to be buried.
The final three letters were to his children and were sealed which is how our officers delivered them to his loved ones.
A cursory search of the apartment which is standard in any crime scene identified two more, nearly exact sets of letters. Each set of letters were also handwritten but had different dates on them. Each roughly a few weeks apart. It was clear that the man had planned his demise on several prior dates and but hadn’t or couldn’t go through with it, until tonight
We reviewed these earlier letters because they were not in envelopes or sealed. The letters to his children were very loving and apologetic; asking for their understanding and forgiveness for his decision. They also spoke of the hopelessness of his medical situation and the difficult decision of letting go.
I never met this man until that night, and yet I feel like I knew him. In reading his letters, I believe that he was a decent man confronted with an impossible problem with no good solution. His final written thoughts were of comforting and reassuring his family and seeking their forgiveness for his decision to end his pain and his life.
We Found A Abandoned Safe In The River. What’s Inside The ABANDONED SAFE? (OPENED)
Obviously, I mean OBVIOUSLY, they have never been to China and have no idea how fucking enormous it is.
If you hop in a car, and start driving, it will take you days… DAYS… passing huge apartment buildings full of hard working, militarized families, studying… working… training…
…building after building. Mile after mile. Kilometer after kilometer. Over and over and over.
One enormous giga-complex housing thousands of families… after another… and another… and yet another.
China is HUGE.
Simply enormous.
…
China is not the third world cesspool that the Western “news” says it is. It’s a nation thirty years in the future. It is proud. It is strong. And it is LETHAL.
It is a dragon wearing a cute panda-bear suit.
You all in the West are unaware.
Backwards. Retarded.
Fed garbage; not just figuratively, but literally. Most American doesn’t even know where California is on a map, or how many States there are, or how much 5 + 8 is.
When I say “stupid”.
I mean it.
Meanwhile in China…
I started using facial recognition and QR to pay back in 2013. That was ten years ago. I haven’t touched a coin or paper money in all that time. Using paper money is so 19th century.
My car is electric and it talks to me, and only turns on when my voice recognition software allows it to.
It self parks, customizes the interior with a rotation of interior motifs, plays my morning jazz tunes, and gives me a nice warm back rub as it links to the toll road and carries me off to my office.
In my office, my staff brings me my coffee and turns on my systems for me. Sometimes they might have a kid or two with them, being sick or what not. No worries, though, they are their next to their parents doing their studies next to the desks.
Lunch is paid for all my staff. It’s one of the state mandated laws, and after they eat a huge healthy cafeteria meal of fruit, vegetables, meat and fish, they go take their normal naps.
…
That’s just the first four hours of a typical day in China.
…
There’s a bunch of dunder-heads that think that the USA can invade China with D-Day style Naval assaults, and the threat of nuclear war.
Troll?
Moron?
Buffoon?
Ignoramus?
They believe that proud and powerful aircraft carrier will lay off the coast of China and launch cascade after cascade of fighters and bombers into China.
They think that stealthy submarines will sneak up and start bombing China. All this unopposed, and the Chinese will take it. Smile and say “… can I have another, master?”
They believe that the proud troops will be easily resupplied by Australia, Japan, Korea and Philippines. After all, that is the on-going American construction activity. Billets. Barracks. Supply depots, and large investments in bordellos for employment for the locals.
Fantasies. NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.
NEVER going to happen.
…
I am here to tell you that World War started in 2008.
Oh, sure, the elements started far earlier. But historians will write that the date of the war began was in 2008.
It peaked in 2020 with the bio-weapon(s) that the USA launched on China during CNY (John Bolton, and Mike Pompeo brilliance there), and fell back towards conventional war with the NATO conflict began in Ukraine.
It hasn’t gone that great though.
Wars don’t go to plan, and this crop of brain-dead, pathological psychopathic oligarchs are dangerously deluded.
Take Ukraine. Ah. The “war in Ukraine”.
What they mean is the unreported hostilities used to counter the Russian “special military operation”.
Over 3000 American soldiers (with countless more NATO gents) are dead. Just because the American “news” isn’t reporting it, doesn’t mean that it is not going on.
Dead Americans are all over the place. I have photos and photos. Movies and movies. But if I put them up, they get pulled. It’s “news you can use”, but that is bad for the Westerners to see.
Good men. Soldiers. American men.
Dead.
Over what? And why?
It is sad.
I cry for the widows at Fort Lenard Wood.
As that phase winds down with a European collapse (economic, social, industrial, and military) a new phase opened up.
All to schedule; a disruption of the middle eastern shipping lanes.
Ah… that’s gonna teach China a lesson!
In their wet dreams, perhaps. China is about 3450 steps ahead of the rest of the world. They know what underwear that you will wear two days from now. Long before you even decide to put some on. That’s how advanced China is.
This idea that “China can be isolated” has failed, and is bound to fail, as the Chinese BRI are now proving how far-sighted and successful the rerouting of shipping avenues have proven themselves.
No wonder both Russia and China are screaming forward; an economic gallop. While the collective “West” is mired in inefficiency, lunacy, and insanity.
None of which is being reported in the “news”.
Here’s some more American troops in Ukraine…
Meanwhile…
We are watching the United States collapse in front of our very eyes.
The USA has this dream of opening up a long-desired war in the Pacific over China. Troops, material and weaponry are flooding toward the Philippines, Japan and Australia. All ready to die for “democracy”.
Whatever the Hell that means.
A rally-cry of the moronic who still believe that “their vote counts” and that American culture (woke, red-pill, open marriage, LGBQ+) is worthy of preserving.
Woo! Woo! I’m gonna kill Commies for all that free gay sex!
And when that day comes… “death by cop” will be experienced in America. Up and down the coasts. As the United States will be bludgeoned by many, many, MANY people; and their nations. People who have been ridiculed and marginalized over the decades of pompous, elitist wars and flouting.
America is NOT respected in the world.
It is despised.
It is no mistake the distain that the illegal immigrants show towards American. And they are the polite ones. The USA is poised to get a much-needed Ass-Kicking at a scale of ferocity that is off the scale; in both ferocity, and in long-duration and everlasting pain.
And the United States has lost.
It just hasn’t been reported on yet.
Look around yourselves. The USA has no downtowns. No factories. No hard workers. No functioning anything. It’s just on the long slow crumble…
At this point in time, “war against China” will not be needed.
It’s OVER.
He HOARDED GUNS! I Bought The MOST EXPENSIVE Storage Unit In The Country!
When I lived in Indiana, my wife and myself took private dance lessons. We studied ballroom dancing. And we were pretty good at it. Bronze and silver level for certain, and we were studying gold level for Foxtrot and Tango. Which is really very good.
We were top level amateur.
I have many stories from this time, and about this situation. But today I want to relate a funny aspect of that situation…
We lived in a mobile home park, and our trailer was pretty small. Aside from the studio or our dance club, there really wasn’t any place to practice our dancing. That was… until one day.
We found a nice secluded area in the countryside. It was a cemetery at the side of a rural road, and there was a nice flat cement area on one of the cemetery slabs. Indeed, YES… we were dancing on the graves of the people in the cemetery.
So yeah. That well explains why cars would slow down and watch us dancing on the graves of the newly deceased. LOL. I guess I spent much of my time in Indiana dancing on the graves of the people that lived there.
A few years ago, I was in line at a cash register waiting to pay for my purchase at a dollar store. I was waiting behind a little girl who was about 8 or 9 years old. She was alone and I was watching her as she meticulously laid out all of her purchases on the conveyor belt. I thought she was so cute.
Then, the cashier asked her if she was sure she had enough money. She nodded her head that she did. The cashier proceeded to ring up her purchases and she told her what the total was. The little girl took out a handful of pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. She started to count the coins slowly and carefully. I was actually enjoying watching her do this!
Then, the cashier informed her that she was missing about 60 cents. She said that the girl would have to put some things back. She was hesitating as she was trying to decide what to remove. I looked at the cashier and I told her that I would pay the difference. The cashier took my money and put her purchases in a bag. Then, the little girl left. (I think she thanked me.)
At this point, the cashier told me that this young child came into the store and pulled this con game every week! The unsuspecting customers behind her ALWAYS paid for the remainder of her purchases! This child was extremely convincing – she really pulled the wool over my eyes! I told the cashier that I wish she would have told me before I paid because I would have wanted to say something to this girl.
I would have told her that what she was doing was wrong because she was tricking people (conning them) into paying for her purchases. I wish I could have told her that I thought she was very smart, that she should work hard in school and that she would do well in sales, marketing or acting!
Take a long hard look at a map and you will notice where China is situated. Nowhere near the US right?
Now look at all the US.bases so very far from the shores of the US but situated close to Asia and close to China. Why is the US there and not back home ready to defend their shores which is exactly what China is doing.
The provocative actions of the US is setting the world on a path of destruction.
China doesn’t talk of war but the US is constantly brainwashing the masses into thinking black is whit and white is black.
The US is constantly provoking wars.
The only two things the US sells is weapons and bullshit, so much bullshit.
The US is far from being a guardian angel but a god of war. Enough.
Pinjur (Macedonia)
This is a traditional Macedonian dish, and it is found on tables everywhere in Macedonia.
Ingredients
Eggplant
1 large eggplant
2 to 6 cloves garlic
Salt (enough to lightly cover the garlic)
Handful roughly chopped walnuts
Optional Ingredients
Olive oil
Fresh lemon
Fresh cilantro
Instructions
Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
Wash eggplant. Poke holes into eggplant randomly with a fork. Place eggplant on a cookie sheet which has been covered with aluminum foil. Roast the eggplant until it is thoroughly cooked and collapses (about 30 to 40 minutes).
While the eggplant is roasting, mash garlic and salt with mortar and pestle until it becomes pasty.
To cool eggplant quickly, slice in half, and leave draining in the sink in a colander. When cool, peel the skin off. Chop eggplant into medium-size chunks.
In bowl, combine eggplant and garlic, mashing eggplant and stirring the garlic throughout. When it is consistently mushy, throw in a handful of chopped walnuts to add crunch and texture. You can add olive oil, a squeeze of fresh lemon, and even cilantro if desired.
Vladimir Putin showed up at Branch No 2 of the National Medical Research Centre of High Medical Technologies – Vishnevsky Central Military Clinical Hospital of the Russian Federation Defence Ministry this week and sat down for a chat with Russian military personnel who had been wounded during the special military operation. Can you imagine Joe Biden doing this with a group of American military personnel? I can’t.
I am posting this because I think it is important that people, especially Americans, have the opportunity to read Putin’s comments. If you are wondering how Putin views the United States, NATO and Ukraine, you need only read the following. There is no nuance. Putin is refreshingly candid.
His concern for the welfare of the soldiers comes across as genuine, sincere. But that is not the news. He makes it very clear that the Western countries are the enemy, not Ukraine. He also vowed to step up attacks on Ukrainian military targets and foreign mercenaries. Putin minces no words in noting that Western hopes of bamboozling him into negotiations for a ceasefire are in vain. Ain’t going to happen
.
President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Hello, guys! Glad to see you. I would like to congratulate you on the New Year.
How is your treatment here going?
Remark: Excellent.
Vladimir Putin: I walked around here, from what I have seen the equipment looks solid, this is clear of course. But, first and foremost, it must be used effectively. I hope, it does.
Remarks: Yes.
Vladimir Putin: You know, of course, I wanted to come here and congratulate you on the New Year, but there was also something I wanted to see. You might have seen me on Direct Line
, at least some of it; it is impossible to watch it in its entirety, four hours, it is crazy just how long it is. But there were things that concerned the Armed Forces and you directly: for example, people asked whether you really had to return to your units after your wounds and treatment and even rehabilitation to obtain the corresponding medical certificates there and even be cleared by military medical commissions. The Defence Ministry denies this, saying it does not happen, at least, not now. Moreover, they said – as I requested some time ago – that housing issues are being resolved during treatment and our service personnel undergo additional training to be able to continue serving, if they want, even those who sustained severe injuries, at military enlistment offices and so forth.
I wanted to hear from you what is really going on, if this is so, if you need to go somewhere else to obtain the necessary documents and certificates. No? So, do you get everything here? The military medical commission examination, all the documents – everything is done here, right?
Remarks: Yes.
Vladimir Putin: Are housing issues being resolved too?
Remarks: Yes.
Remark: Already been resolved.
Vladimir Putin: Ok, I see. They have been resolved for you and they are being resolved for our other fighters. At least, the system for resolving housing issues has been created and it is working, that is the most important thing, right?
And you are also receiving some additional professional training to allow those willing to continue their service in the Armed Forces but in different positions, health permitting. Is that so? Is that the reality?
Remark: Yes.
Vladimir Putin: Thank you. So, how is it going?
Remark: Good.
Vladimir Putin: This is one of the best medical institutions of the Defence Ministry. Not all of them are so well-equipped, so shiny, so to speak. But gradually the Ministry will bring everything up to the standard, to this level in terms of quality.
Any questions you want to ask me, guys? Don’t be shy.
Alexander Dublyanin: Comrade Supreme Commander-in-Chief,
During the special military operation we are liberating Russian territory. How do you feel about Western countries helping our enemy?
Vladimir Putin: The point is not that they are helping our enemy. They are our enemy. They are solving their own problems with their hands. That is what it is all about. This has been the case for centuries, unfortunately, and continues to be the case today.
Ukraine itself is not our enemy whereas those who want to destroy Russian statehood and to achieve, as they say, a strategic defeat of Russia on the battlefield, are mainly in the West, but still, there are different people there. There are people who sympathise with us and who are with us at heart. But there are the elites who think the existence of Russia (at least in its current state and size) is unacceptable. They want to disintegrate it. As a matter of fact, you are young people, some have read about this, perhaps: they do not hide it. They speak and write about this publicly, and have been doing it for decades, if we are talking about contemporary history. For decades, they have simply been writing frankly about it: divide Russia into five parts, one is too much. I can talk about this till morning, but it is obvious.
Therefore, they have been nurturing the Kiev regime for quite a long time, precisely to create this conflict. Unfortunately for us, they have achieved this: they started this conflict and are trying to achieve their objective, namely the task of fighting Russia, with the help of Ukrainians.
You probably see on the battlefield that they are gradually losing their zest. When a projectile flies, it is difficult to understand whether they are losing it or not, but in general you probably know that the situation on the battlefield is changing. This is despite the fact that the entire “civilised” West is fighting us.
You, too, have probably heard many times: the Ukrainian army expends 5,000–6,000 155-calibre shells there per day of combat operations, and the United States produces 14,000 per month. Per month! And they use 5,000 per day. Yes, they are planning to increase it during 2024, but still, they produced 14,000–15,000, they will produce up to 20,000. But if you use 5,000 a day, then the supply depletes quite quickly. It is close to that now. And we are building up and will continue to, exponentially at that. They were supplied with more than 400 tanks (450 or whatever it is), and in a year we will produce and overhaul 1,600. This is not a state secret; in fact, there will be probably more. It is like this almost across the board. Therefore, though it has been their goal to deal with Russia from time immemorial, we will deal with them faster, it seems.
And the most important thing we have is, of course, what I have spoken about repeatedly: the unity of our people and society, because there is an understanding of how important the job you are doing on the battlefield is in the armed struggle for our country and our future. That is what’s most important. The point is not that we do not like that they are supplying Ukraine, that’s not the core of the problem. The problem is not with Ukraine, but with those who are trying to destroy Russia using Ukraine. That is the problem. But they will fail: it is simply out of the question, absolutely out of the question.
I think that the realisation is starting to dawn on them, and the rhetoric is changing: those who were talking just yesterday about the need to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia are now looking for the right words on how to quickly end the conflict. We also want to end the conflict, as quickly as possible, but only on our terms. We have no desire to fight endlessly, but we are not going to cede our positions either. You fought there, you were wounded there; are we going to surrender everything now? The cameras are on, otherwise I would make a certain gesture here now; you all know what kind of gesture it is. So, it is not going to happen.
I am Sergeant Shamalyuk. I have a question. From the very beginning of the special operation, our enemies have been constantly and regularly shelling the territories near the border, killing civilians and children, destroying villages and cities. I have the following question for you. Do you think it is possible and necessary to take tougher measures against the adversary so that the thought does not even cross their minds to commit these atrocities?
in Belgorod is of course a terrorist attack. Why? Because of what they have done under the cover of two missiles – I think it was Olkha: they fired from multiple-launch rocket systems (MLRS). You, as military people, know what MLRS is. This weapon is not selective, it hits areas. This weapon struck right in the centre of the city, where people were walking before the New Year. It was a targeted strike on the civilian population. Of course, this is a terrorist attack; there is no other way to describe it.
Should we respond in kind? Of course, we can hit squares in Kiev or any other city. But Denis, there are children walking there, mothers with strollers. I understand, because I am quite angry, too, but I want to ask you: do we need to do this, target the squares?
Denis Shamalyuk: No, I am not saying that it should [be] against the civilian population, but specifically against military infrastructure…
Vladimir Putin: That is what we are doing.
Denis Shamalyuk: So that they will not be able to come round and respond.
Vladimir Putin: Yes, but that is exactly what we are doing. We strike with high-precision weapons at locations where they make decisions, where military personnel and mercenaries gather, at other similar centres, and at military facilities, above all. These blows can really be felt. We will continue to do this. You probably noticed that the very next day after these attacks were carried out. I think they are continuing today, and tomorrow, too.
Do you know why they are doing it? They want to intimidate us and to create some uncertainty within our country. For our part, we will increase the strikes that I have mentioned. Of course, not a single crime like that, and this is certainly a crime against the civilian population, will go unpunished, this is for sure, there can be no doubt.
Denis Shamalyuk: Thank you.
Vladimir Putin: Please.
Ivan Shushakov: May I?
Vladimir Putin: Yes, please.
Ivan Shushakov: Comrade Supreme Commander-in-Chief,
Major Shushakov.
For two years now, our country has been fighting for its future. Please tell me, how do you assess the progress of the special military operation?
Vladimir Putin: I have already said this, I can repeat, but you can feel this yourselves. Our Armed Forces are getting more capable and prepared to use advanced weapons than any other army in the world.
First, we have weapons that are not available in any army in the world, and second, we can use everything that is being developed and produced. Third, everything that is being developed is being produced and supplied rather fast. I know, there is probably not enough on the front lines, and they would like more of all the latest stuff there, such as drones, as well as more means of suppressing enemy drones, which are flying over you like flies. I understand everything, but still, what is being produced appears quickly enough.
You know what else is rather important? Modern means of warfare and their effectiveness depend on how quickly an army can find out what is the most important thing at this moment and respond in terms of producing and introducing that in combat as quickly as possible.
We are doing this better and better, probably better than anywhere else. And these are very huge advantages that our Armed Forces are gaining. I think that no one else could do the same today. And these capabilities of the Russian Armed Forces are constantly increasing, multiple times over. So, in general, you are already a senior officer, so you know, we try not to give high marks…
Ivan Shushakov: Exactly.
Vladimir Putin: Satisfactory.
Please.
Alexander Davydov: Comrade Supreme Commander-in-Chief, may I ask a question, sir?
We can see that you are very busy. How do you manage to maintain such high performance?
Vladimir Putin: Meeting you gives me strength. I am not joking. I am being honest. When I meet people like you, it gives me extra strength and confidence that we are doing the right thing.
Alexander Davydov: Thank you.
Vladimir Putin: This is a very important element. In fact, I am not being ironic, this is an important element, for me, at least.
My question is, what are the results of the past year and what are the real plans for this year? What should everyone, not just the Armed Forces and military personnel, be prepared for?
Vladimir Putin: The country in general, right?
Yevgeny Korsun: Yes. Thank you.
Vladimir Putin: You know, as far as the results of last year are concerned, I spoke about this on Direct Line, what can I say. The most important thing is that you keep everything tight at the front and, moreover, the practical strategic initiative is in our hands today. Senior commanders have learned to act carefully instead of carrying out combat missions at any cost. At least that is what they report to me. I always insist that everything must be done and any offensive operations carried out after the adversary has sustained heavy fire. This is what concerns the battlefield.
Talking about the country as a whole, of course, the fundamental thing is not only that we preserved the country’s economy, we did not allow it to be destroyed, which is what the enemy was counting on – this is also in response to your question. It was not Ukraine that hoped to destroy our economy; it is not capable of doing it. It has already been completely destroyed itself; there is nothing left there, it lives entirely on handouts. All its leaders travel around with hat in hand, begging for an extra million dollars.
Our situation is completely different. In 2022, our economy contracted by 2.1 percent. But recently, the Government has reported to me – the calculations are ongoing, and new data appear – the latest data are that it declined not 2.1 but 1.2 percent. This is of essence. In 2023 year, the economy grew 3.5 percent. Gross domestic product (GDP), the main economic indicator, is how much the country has produced. You can use money to calculate how much you produced, plus 3.5 percent. And the decline was 1.2 percent. We made up for the decline and moved forward. This is an absolutely fundamental matter. This is the first point, and it is a very important one.
This shows that the economy is stable. Inflation has gone up a little, which means prices have risen, but we are keeping everything under control. You know, we have never seen anything like this. We have always noted with sadness that our main revenues come from oil and gas. For the first time in many years, the growth of processing industries in our economic structure far exceeds revenues from oil and gas. I think that oil and gas revenues grew three percent, while the processing industry has yielded many times more. This has never happened before. This indicates that we are undergoing structural changes in the economy. It is very important.
And why is that? When Western companies left our market, they apparently expected that everything would collapse overnight: businesses would shutter and thousands of people would be left without work. And, in the best-case scenario for the adversary in the broad sense of the word: for the opponents of Russia in general, and not just on the battlefield, people will take to the streets and demand bread and work.
We have the lowest unemployment rate in the history of Russia: 2.9 percent, which has never happened before. And real incomes of the population have grown (there is such a thing as real disposable income of the population) and real wages have grown, and quite significantly. All this suggests that we have a stable economy and stable financial system.
Russia was disconnected from the international payment system known as SWIFT. Apparently, they hoped that everything would collapse here too. We supply our traditional export goods, but what about the settlements? However, everything works.
Everyone thought that enterprises would stop because they stopped supplying us with components, but it turns out that everything is possible. Yes, there are problems, but nevertheless they are being addressed.
Small and medium-sized businesses are also working effectively. Some foreign enterprises have left, but our businesses have taken their place. Firstly, there are highly qualified personnel who have not left; there are good production managers in a variety of sectors both in industry and in the services sector, and everything works. This is the most important thing: the stability of the country’s economy and financial system because this is the foundation for everything.
And, of course, as I have already said, the number of weapons produced in Russia has increased multiple times over, including when I talk about the growth of industrial production, but not only: one third of the growth was achieved in civilian production branches, which is very important. So, the stability of the financial and economic system and the real sector of the economy is probably the most important thing.
In addition to this, we are implementing all our previously planned projects. In terms of infrastructure, as you understand, this means trillions, and we are building roads and opening new routes every week. This is very important, because it is not just to take one ride there and back. A road means life, and economic life too begins with it: small and medium-sized businesses appear immediately, because there was no other way to get there, but now it is possible. A completely different picture of the world emerges.
Despite the difficulties involved, housing issues are gradually being resolved in the country. Social issues are also very important. Many of you have families and children, right? And there is maternity capital, which no one is shutting down. The country continues to meet all social commitments in full. Moreover, we have created quite a powerful and balanced system of support for families with children (this is very important for the future of the country), starting from the woman’s pregnancy until the child is 18 years old. This is important for real people, and therefore for the country as a whole.
So, strange as it may seem, despite the fact that we are in a state of armed conflict, all the main indicators of the country’s viability and effectiveness have gone up. And this is probably the most important indicator of Russia’s situation.
Yevgeny Korsun: Thank you.
Vladimir Putin: What else? Is that all?
Happy New Year to you. All the best. Best wishes. Get well!
My dad and I were on our epic father-daughter trip in the Galapagos. A few months earlier, he had shattered his ‘tibial plateau’ (basically his whole knee area), and been on no-weight bearing for months. So he wasn’t his usual athletic self, in that we needed to walk slower. Especially since on that island, there were no sidewalks or even paths, just uneven rocks everywhere. Anyway, some other guy gets impatient and pushes my dad out of the way to catch up to the naturalist. It only got him about 30 seconds of ‘shortcut’. When we got to the next ‘stop’ with the naturalist, that guy was in the front row. . . and a bird pooped while swerving and covered the whole front of just him and nobody else. I didn’t see it, but I heard my dad laughing and he said he would explain it later. Because that guy was MAD. LOL. Instant karma.
Returning from a service call in Honolulu, the lady in front of me at the TSA line had serious trouble lifting her (obviously very heavy) carry-on onto the x-ray conveyor. It set off all sorts of alarms when it went through, and the TSA guy did a manual inspection as a result. When he opened it up, the suitcase’s contents were revealed: it was completely full of cans of Spam (the processed meat product). I was absolutely convinced that they actually contained something more nefarious and that she’d likely be arrested, but the TSA guy simply zipped the case back up and sent her on her way.
I was next in line, and, noticing the puzzled look on my face, the TSA guy explained that Spam is considered a gourmet delicacy in Japan, where it sells for around 3–4x what it does in Hawaii. As a result, there is a steady flow of Japanese tourists to the islands, who pretty much pay for their vacations by doing what she did. I was born and raised in the UK, where Spam has a reputation for being gross and disgusting, and something you would only eat if you can’t afford any nicer form of protein.
I’m a computer consultant and only take contract work. A few years ago I was contacted by a recruiter for a contract with a company that makes Lasik machines. While I was going to visit the company a few times, the work would be done remotely in my office. I had already worked with a sister company and had experience with their software. The OS was somewhat rare so my 30+ years of experience with it made me a good choice. I negotiated the hourly wage with the recruiter and things seemed to be going well.
The recruiter called me and told me we were all set to go. All I had to do was take the drug test. Huh? I’ve never been asked to take a drug test in my life. I wasn’t worried about passing it, just taken aback. I don’t drive a bus or a cab or an airplane, I write software. What was their concern, that I’d get high while programming and let bugs creep in? This seemed like a red flag. After 30+ years of consulting and having been burned a couple of times I’ve learned to look out for these.
I asked the recruiter why. His response was, it was company policy. He offered to talk to the company but I was done. A red flag is a red flag. A software/engineering company that requires everyone to take a drug test is trying to give themselves an out if they want to get rid of someone. I don’t know what that would have to do with me since you can let a contractor go at any time.
I passed the job onto a friend of mine who was fine with the drug test. He worked for them for a week and then quit. My intuition was right.
First, yes, you have to pay the taxes. They follow the property, not the owner. If you don’t pay the taxes, the municipality can arrange a tax sale.
Second, your lawyer screwed up. It’s real estate law 101 you check to see if there are any outstanding taxes before you close the transaction. It’s a standard clause in most real estate purchase contracts that any outstanding taxes get paid out of the purchase price. Consult your lawyer and if their E&O doesn’t cover it, find another lawyer to sue them.
Third, if you have title insurance, they may be on the hook for this, and they obviously screwed up big time if you bought insurance and they forgot to check tax arrears because that’s insurance law 101. If you have it, contact them immediately.
Fourth, did you use a broker? Again, this is Real Estate Broker 101. If they didn’t know about it, they screwed up. Speak to them as their commission may be reduced by the tax amount and they obviously didn’t earn it. If they won’t help, get a lawyer again.
Fifth, see a lawyer about suing the previous owner. I don’t have your purchase and sale contract. You can’t sue them unless it’s clear from the contract that the sale price included a property free from taxes.
Sixth, your mortgage lender screwed up, because it’s Banking 101 that you don’t give a person a mortgage on a property that has tax arrears. You better tell them because those taxes have priority over their mortgage.
Please note that the municipality doesn’t have to wait for you to recover money from someone else. You may not be personally responsible for those taxes (i.e. you can’t be sued for them) but they’re still a charge on the property.
If you did this without a lawyer, broker or title insurance, consider this a life lesson in trying to save money. If you didn’t even have a lawyer review the purchase offer, double shame on you.
Wife Has MELTDOWN After Husband Wants Nothing To Do With Her After Discovering The Truth About Her
This is MY experience. It does not reflect on the many, many docs I’ve never met.
I cannot stand Orthopedic surgeons. Neurosurgeons and Spine surgeons are not far behind.
These guys make a gazillion dollars and don’t know the first thing about caring for patients. I am convinced that they look up from the knee they just replaced and are stunned to see a person attached to it.
We used to roll our eyes at the whole orthopedic floor, 6 west. The ortho docs would breeze through and leave the bulk of the post-op care to PAs. If a patient got into trouble they would disappear.
So who got called to take care of the poor patient that is now in diabetic or cardiac or pulmonary trouble? Well, it sure wasn’t them. The poor nurses on 6 West would be frantic. They would frequently page overhead…
“ANY INTERNAL MEDICINE DOCTOR TO SIX WEST, STAT!”
“Oh no, we got us a FOOBA.” we would say as we bounded up the stairs to see what problem, that likely could have been anticipated and avoided, was awaiting us.
What’s a FOOBA?
It means Found On Ortho Barely Alive.
We called that unit The Killing Fields.
We used to smirk, “The good thing about 6 West is it’s close to a hospital.”
The orthopedic surgeons would do surgery on anyone! Ninety years old and demented with multiple medical problems, needs a new hip.
I had an orthopod tell me. “It’s my job to replace his knee. It’s your job to keep him alive afterwards.” This after the poor patient, with end stage emphysema, who could not survive a haircut, much less surgery, crashed and went straight to the ICU after this wahoo was done with him.
I used to joke that he was part of the No Joint Left Behind program.
I had another surgeon, who could not remember that he had met me numerous times, ask me repeatedly who I was. I wanted to answer, “I’m the woman who has saved your sorry carcass more times than I can count.”
This guy was discharging a patient when I just happened by.
The poor guy was breathless and grabbing his chest as the orthopod gave him discharge instructions.
I jumped between them.
“Sir, are you having pressure in your chest?”
He nodded, too breathless to speak.
(Yelling) “I need help in here. EKG, O2, aspirin, nitro, beta blocker….NOW!”
We get the patient stabilized, the ortho doc had disappeared.
His note in the chart? Two lines; “Wound clean, dry and intact. Discharged home.”
Next time I saw the surgeon, he introduced himself to me, AGAIN. He had no idea who I was.
Ok, I feel better getting that off my chest.
Wife Accuses Husband Of Cheating And Gets The Shock Of A Lifetime!
There’s a cold spell in Russia and that means broken hot water mains and frozen apartment front doors. My friend reports that in northwestern Moscow region towns Solnechnegorsk and Skhodnya people are left without central heating.
A pipe with boiling water burst in the Moscow Theater of the Moon during a ballet performance of “The Nutcracker.”
Spectators first believed that the sharp explosive sounds were made by the ballet dancer cracking walnuts, when the performance was stopped and more than 300 people were evacuated from the building.
Residents of another town near Moscow, Podolsk, have not had access to heating for more than 2 days due to a break in the heating main.
Ice appeared on the windows. Indoor toilets turned into outdoor outhouses. This causes another problem. As greedy municipal services deliberately provide heating with less pressure than temperatures required, people turn on home heaters and air conditioner to heat apartments and overburden electric stations causing cascading blackouts.
Entire neighborhoods lose access to electricity on top of lack of access to central heating. Dark and cold like in the Middle Ages when conservative values reigned supreme.
Some residents said they would like to make a fire in the living room but afraid that fire engines won’t be able to extinguish it if it gets out of control because there are no fire escapes and there’s not ladder that can reach 20th floor.
The day before, local residents went out to picket and got detained because it’s illegal to protest in Russia.
Emergency situation announced in Podolsk over hearing mains breakdown that couldn’t be fixed during night. When I was a kid , “pipes breakdown” happened every winter no exception at our school and we missed one or two weeks of classes.
The Moon is really the worst place where we could set up a colony.
It’s not so bad as to be utterly impossible – but it’s not as good as Mars.
The Moon’s biggest negatives are:
It’s “day” length is 28 days – so you get 14 days of continuous nighttime – and then 14 days of continuous sunlight. This means that all human activities will need artificial light – and a lot of radiation protection. Solar power is pretty much useless unless you have 14+ days of energy storage for everything.
Air and water have to come from ice deposits that can be found only in deep craters near the lunar poles – places where the sun has not shone for a billion years. There isn’t a whole lot of ice there – and if we start getting excited about making fuel for rockets and providing air and water for an entire colony of thousands of people – then it’s going to run out pretty fast – and it’s an irreplaceable resource – once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.
The Moon’s gravity is very weak – it’s possible that it’s enough for humans to thrive there – but it’s also possible that it’ll be no better than zero’g – which would make colonization impossible.
Moon dust is incredibly nasty stuff – under the microscope, each grain of sand looks a lot like a stone-age axe-head with razor-sharp edges. It gets all over everything – and breathing it is very dangerous. Keeping dust out of our habitats and out of every moving part of every vehicle – i s paramount – but because it sticks to everything – that’s going to be a challenge.
The main positive for the moon is close to Earth – just a few days flight time.
Compared to Mars:
Mars’ day length is just 20 minutes longer than Earth – it’s easy for us to adapt so a comfortable day/night cycle is available. Solar panels work well. Radiation is still an issue – but nowhere near as bad as on the Moon.
Air and water also has to come from ice deposits – but we find ice just under the Martian surface almost everywhere. It’s unlikely that we’d ever run out.
Mars gravity is also weaker than on Earth – but about twice that of the Moon – so the odds of it being enough for long term human habitation are much better.
Mars dust is also nasty stuff – it’s toxic – it’s rougher than Earth dust – but not as bad as Moon dust.
Mars has abundant CO2 – which can be used as a starting point for making methane and both hydrocarbons and carbohydrates.
The main disadvantage (compared to the Moon) is that it takes 6 months to get there – and you can really only fly once every 26 months.
My husband was dying of cancer and had less than two weeks to live. I knew this, however, he was in denial. He was a classic car enthusiast and wanted so bad to drive his older van, just for a little bit, however, by that time, he was too weak to stand unassisted, so I told him that he’s very sick at the moment, because he just got out of the hospital and needed to rest, and maybe after he got a little stronger, and we could go for a drive. I knew he’d never get stronger, but it did ease his mind a bit and in his last couple days, he did hallucinate that he was driving his van, so in a way, I turned out to be right.
A couple days later, I lied again, for the second time in our marriage- when he was actively dying, I told him it was okay to go, I’d be okay. Tomorrow will be a month since he passed- I’m not okay that he passed away, but I am okay with knowing that I did everything I could possibly do to ease his worries when he was dying.
I worked at an office job for 5 years in Beverly Hills, for a doctor who did a type of cosmetic electoral surgery for the stars. He was a smart guy who made countless millions but he treated his employees like second class citizens and was all about the Benjamins rather than helping people.
After a couple quarters where new patient numbers had started to go down, the doctor and office manager decided they could cut costs by culling the office of some of the staff in order to bring in new workers for lower pay. Now I had already been planning to leave that hostile environment for awhile anyway, and even had my resignation letter written in my desk drawer so it wasn’t a terrible tragedy when the manager brought me in to tell me I’d be let go. In fact it was better as I wanted to take some time off to travel and this would allow me to claim benefits for a couple months whereas I wouldn’t get anything if I had just quit. But what did get me really perturbed was how the manager made a point to follow me around and sit beside me watching my computer as I went about closing out my workbooks and getting any personal items i didn’t want to leave behind because she thought I might sabotage the files or something in a fit of rage. Well, when she got up for a minute to check her office I decided I would do a little something for myself since I wasn’t even getting to say goodbye to my coworker friends and they were treating me like a criminal. I put a password lock on the databases of doctor names that I had put together and spent years building relationships with and were a vital part of the office. I didn’t say anything and it was a month later my manager called up sounding very sweet, wondering if I might know how to access those filles since she couldn’t find the password. I would’ve gladly given it were it not that they actually fought to try and keep me from getting benefits (unsuccessfully) and so I told her sorry, I seem to have forgotten, and hung up.
SUPERGIRL 2 but is 1920 |Unreleased Fan Made| Alternate Timeline
I am on my forth marriage, 17 years now, and how the first three ended:
My first marriage, 4 years and no children, ended tragically. My wife and I were to meet at our local hangout, which was one block from where I worked, after I got out of work. I was running about 30 minutes late, had to stay over, and when I arrived where we were to meet I was told her was taken to the hospital without being told the reason why. I rushed to the hospital were an officer told me my wife was stabbed by a patron whom she had slapped, I found out later she slapped him for being ‘free’ with his hands in a very inappropriate manner. Three days later she succumbed to her wound, she was stabbed in the heart and the damage was to server (open heart surgery was in its infancy then).
My second marriage, 6 years and three daughters, was great up to the time our third daughter was born. After we brought our daughter home my wife would become very aggressive when I got home from work, she would start right off when I walked in and I allowed her to use me as a ‘punching bag’; I thought better me than the girls, I know that she never hurt the girls as I would have seen any physical evidence (bruises or other signs) on the girls.
Then one day she demanded that I give her $200.00 so she and her mother could go play bingo, and when I refused she grabbed an 8” carving knife and attacked me; in self-defense I slapped the knife out of her hand and punched her (first and only time in my life I ever struck a woman) breaking her nose (out of instinct due to my military training). Yes the police were called and even when she admitted she attacked my with the knife I was forced to leave the home by the police; they left the girls alone with this ‘crazy’ woman (being polite on how I view her). Contacted a lawyer that very next day and started divorce proceedings with desire of full custody. In the end I got my divorce but in the State of New York the father never got full custody of the children (not sure if that is true today) even if proven that the mother is actually an unfit parent. My ‘X’ passed away back in 2016 from over self-medication, my daughters and I have a wonderful relationship.
My third marriage, 22 years with one Son and two Daughters, ended on December 20, 2000 which was the day she walked out , and two weeks later I received the divorce papers from the court, no trial or arbitration, just a divorce decree that the marriage was terminated (no reason was mentioned in the divorce papers). I guess she just got tired of being a married woman, she did wait until our children were grown and out on their own. As far as I knew we had a normal married life, we had our arguments, disagreements, ups and downs, she was not perfect and neither was I. I was 9 years her senior but age was never an issue between us. And even though we have been divorced for 21 years now, I still have contact with her on a very friendly way; I have even gone to her home to repair her vehicles and my present wife and I have even had a holiday meal with my ex-wife and her husband. I know it is a strange situation or relationship, but after all she is the mother of my children and my present wife understands that and encourages the positive relationship between me and my ex-wife – in other words my present wife trusts me.
As for my forth marriage, 17 years and only children is from past marriages, all I can say is we haven’t killed each other yet 😁 I am 70 and she is 69 and neither one of us want to fight for custody of our fur-babies 😂 (our running joke), seriously we are just as much in love as the day we first got married 🥰
Several years ago, maybe 5 or 6, I took $1000.00 to the bank to pay down my credit card bill. There was quite a line and the banks assistant manager suggested to save time to use the atm next to the teller windows. I told him I was using cash and he said fine, no problem, it takes cash. Great! I like to save time and I still had a 1 1/2 drive home. So, as usual, I insert my credit card, select pay statement, tell it how much, and insert my money, listen to the machine whir, and then nothing! No receipt, just a blank screen. Uhg!
That nice gentleman was sitting at his desk, so I stepped over to him and told him the machine ate my money. He asked how much and went to uselessly poke buttons on that ATM. He didn’t know what to say or do. I asked how this would be rectified, he didn’t know, but he had someone to call.
This is where a series of calls were made to IT, help desk and a few others that didn’t have answers. Now, I didn’t want to leave the bank without some clue as to how this would be resolved and some sort of documentation of what happened.
Well, it turns out, the bank main office (or wherever he called) had no policy on how to handle this. They expected me to walk out the door like nothing happened. That was not going to happen. This gentleman bank employee completely agreed with me, that I was entitled to some sort of documentation. The main office left me hanging and after a hour of phone calls it came down to, we will audit the machine at the end of the day, then, if we find a discrepancy, we will credit you. But nothing for me to take home. They did verbally agree to note on my account that I wasn’t to be charged late fee or interest IF they found the money. The main office really left me with a bad taste in my mouth by their lack of ability to give me some sort of documentation.
Those calls ended in a stalemate, they had my money, they wouldn’t or couldn’t find a way to make me feel comfortable about leaving the bank without the money, a receipt, or some sort of trouble ticket.
That gentleman in the bank, spoke to the branch manager and the two of them worked up a description of the situation, basically a statement of facts for me to take home. They agreed completely that they too would not have just left and excepted that it would magically be fixed. They were great, the main office or whatever was not great.
The resolution ended up being a letter in the mail saying my account was credited $1000.00. No explanation, no apology, no acknowledgment that there was a problem.
As I recall, I wrote the corporate offices and got no reply there either. I will no longer use an atm to deposit cash.
The summer of 1990, I backpacked across Europe with my two sisters. We were all very athletic back then. I was a gym rat and avid cyclist, my sister Mary walked a ton and bussed tables at the Space Needle restaurant in the evenings, and Joanne was an accomplished high school athlete.
Though we all spoke a little German, at the time I was semi-fluent, thanks to a knack for languages and a mother who spoke it at home. Anyhoo, in the backpacker circles we traveled, there were a ton of German tourists. So it came as no surprise that I was able to eavesdrop on a few conversations.
Most of them were innocuous, and to be honest I had to really concentrate to mentally translate what was being said. But I’ll never forget what I overheard when we ventured out for our first-in-our-lives visit to a topless beach. (Or as the Europeans would call it, a beach.)
My sisters and I were laying on the sand in our bikinis, tops still on, when Mary and Joanne decided to cool off by getting in the water. As they were walking toward the surf, two German dudes (I will call them Rolf and Jurgen) started talking:
Rolf: Look at those girls. They’re cute, but …
Jurgen: … big muscles.
Rolf: Yes, they would be very pretty if it weren’t for the muscles. What’s the deal, I wonder?
Jurgen: They’re American. Americans like girls with muscles.
Rolf: What makes you think they’re American?
Jurgen: They’re covering their breasts.
I didn’t say anything, but when it came MY turn to go into the water, I waited for them to look, then flexed, Popeye-style, and winked.
My ex-mother in law was a real doozy. I married her youngest son and she did NOT approve. She went out of the way to disrupt our wedding as much as possible. We had hired a classical guitar duet for music at the reception. She didn’t like that and showed up that day with her record player and a stack of records. She talked to the Priest and changed our vows. Decided that we (who paid for everything ourselves) did not have enough food for the reception so she ordered several hundred dollars of fried chicken. Luckily I was able to cancel it. She called the bakery and cut our cake order in half. Managed to fix that, too. Called the church and cancelled our use of the kitchen attached to the reception hall. I managed to fix that too. It was very stressful and she never stopped. We ended up moving 1,000 miles away and limiting contact.
To understand these, let’s see the sanctions and how they play :-
Sanction 1 :-
Embargo on Technology Imports from the West
The Problem was this Embargo was passed on 28/2/22 but was effective only from 1/6/22 and later postponed to 1/7/22
So Russia exported massively these imports from 1/3/22 to 30/6/22
Enough for 2 years almost through Turkey and Central Asian Nations like Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan
That gave them until 30/6/2024 to find substitutes
They seem to have found substitutes for most of these Imports from China & their own Domestic production
This extension was to give UK and others a chance to fill their coffers with Russian Oil and Gas and have good reserves
Sanction 2
Withdrawal of Western Businesses from Russia causing Capital Flight
The Plan was to cause $ 80 Billion of Capital Flight and force a temporary panic
Putin was ready though and immediately got every single business taken over by Russian Entities and took over the equivalent of 560 Billion Rubles ($ 68 Billion) of wealth from these companies
The Swift reaction of Putin prevented these companies from being able to get away with their assets
The Readiness of Russian entities and Chinese entities to take over these assets was another major blow
Sanctions 3
Removal of Russian Banks from Swift
The Problem was that of the 158 Banks connected to Swiss, almost 19 Banks still are connected to SWIFT even today
So these 19 Banks can get all the money it wants and transfer them to the remaining 139 Banks
It’s like keeping SBI connected to Swift but removing Bank of India and Dhanalaxmi Bank
The use of CIPS and alternate systems further ensured Russian Stability of Inflows especially in RMB
These 19 Banks are mandatory because the West wants Russian Fertilizers and Gas and Oil even today, through third parties
Sanctions 4:-
Mastercard and Visa were removed from the Russian Settlement Systems overseas
Again the Local systems of settlement continued because had MasterCard or Visa threatened to cut off their local settlement network, every nation would be kicking them out permanently
This allowed enough time to set up Mir Pay plus get Wechat and other payment gateways including Union Pay from China
Mir quickly established a presence in 39 countries very fast indicating that Putin was prepared for this
Sanctions 5:-
Russia’s Asset Freeze
Problem was Russia had Oil and Gas and it’s own Food
It thus had customers willing to trade in Rubles like China and India and Middle East and Central Asia and Turkey
Thus Russias asset freeze meant zilch
Sanctions 6
Embargo on Russian Oil and Gas
Russia sold to India and India resold to Europe at 30% profit
Europe needed Russian Energy and had no alternate and was helpless
Putin forced them to pay in Rubles so that meant they couldn’t control the money needed
So the Sanctions were weak to begin with and imposed by people who didn’t know their heads from the a**es
They were slowly imposed and more of playing to the gallery than any realistic sanctions
Russia was also very well prepared this time unlike in 2014
Putin and Elvira did superbly while Biden and his team of clowns were no match
I was a deputy sheriff working in a small town. They had their fair and it was packed. Some guy is very impatient leaving the fair parking. He starts honking—long long blasts at the car in front of him that had stopped. That car is trying to load in an elderly passenger.
The driver of this car remains impatient even though everyone can clearly see the elderly person needs help getting in that car. He finally cuts his wheels to go around the car in front. He then steps on the gas and revs the motor, honks his horn, and then starts to accelerate rapidly while flipping the bird at the other car.
he ran into the gate to exit and does major damage to his driver’s side front fender and the entire driver’s side of his car. It was a nice new car. I walk over snd zi am smiling. He is pissed and wants to think he can intimidate me. Oh hell no. I was just going to cite him for losing traction and driving unsafely. However he wouldn’t shut up and decided to yell in my face.
he smelled of an alcoholic beverage. I decided he needed to perform the drunk driving tests. He failed. I guess he had a little to much beer inside the fair. I arrested him. I towed his vehicle. I figure his impatience cost him a ton of money.
Car damage probably $2000+
DUI (back then) $4,000 (and probation fees)
Attorney fees $8,000
Gate $1,000
tow and storage fees $250
Getting all that because you are rude, impatient and intoxicated? Priceless.
Oh, the people in the car he was honking at left right after I got that jerk out of his car. The circled around snd came back by while i was giving the Jack wagon his DUI tests. They waved, smiled and gave thumbs up!
You may not recognize him today — he looks a lot different from the way he did in 1967, when at the age of 20 he became the founder and frontman for what would become one of the most successful and enduring acts in music history.
But when the band he created was selling millions of albums and playing to packed arenas, Green was long gone — destitute, homeless, and quite mad.
Peter Green had been a rising star in Britain’s blues revival of the 1960s. His guitar playing caught the attention of Bluesbreakers frontman John Mayall, who let the teenage Green sit in with the band when lead guitarist Eric Clapton was unavailable. When Clapton eventually left to form Cream, Mayall gave the job to Green, predicting that within a few years he would eclipse Clapton as England’s greatest blues guitarist.
After a year with Mayall, Green was eager to front his own band. He poached two of his Bluesbreakers bandmates, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, enticing them to join by naming the band Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac.
The band, which played a mix of blues standards and original compositions by Green, enjoyed overnight success. Behind Green’s soulful voice and raw, authentic guitar playing, their debut self-titled album, Fleetwood Mac, spent 37 weeks on the UK charts, and was the fourth best-selling album of the year. Green would quickly mature as a songwriter, charting with such compositions as Black Magic Woman (later a major hit for Santana) and the instrumental Albatross, which shot to No. 1.
As their fame and popularity increased, Green’s bandmates began to notice changes in his behavior. On a tour of Europe in 1970, Green abruptly left for several weeks to join a German commune where he ingested large quantities of LSD. His erratic behavior had intensified; he grew a beard and began wearing long robes and crucifixes, and spoke of his desire for the band to give away the money they’d earned. His compositions around this time became increasingly darker, as evidenced in his song The Green Manalishi (with the Two Prong Crown):
Now, when the day goes to sleep and the full moon looks The night is so black that the darkness cooks Don’t you come creepin’ around – makin’ me do things I don’t want to
Can’t believe that you need my love so bad Come sneakin’ around tryin’ to drive me mad Bustin’ in on my dreams – making me see things I don’t wanna see
Two months after his stay at the German commune, Green left Fleetwood Mac. He released a solo album the following year as well as sessions with B.B. King, and then faded into obscurity.
Broke and unable to care for himself, he moved into the home of his brother and sister-in-law, who encouraged him to seek psychiatric treatment. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia in the late 70s and began a long road to recovery. He was given anti-psychotic drugs which managed his symptoms, but according to Green, caused a complete loss of interest in music. So for the next several decades he went on and off the medication, a struggle which lasts to the present day.
He formed the Peter Green Splinter Group in 1997. The band released nine albums over the next eight years until Green abruptly disbanded the group.
He lives today in comfortable retirement in the south of England, looked after by close friends. Mick Fleetwood visited him several years ago and described the bittersweet day: “He’s still warm and kind, but otherwise he’s not the man I knew, clearly.”
It’s unclear whether the LSD Green took triggered his underlying schizophrenia or merely exacerbated it, but one thing seems clear: had he remained healthy, Peter Green would likely have become one of the most influential recording artists of all time.
Sadly, many people who read this post have probably never heard of him
it was the worst year of my life. We had moved into a brand new dream home with a pool. The boys swam 2–3 times a day. My wife and I talked everyday about how happy we were. My wife got a promotion and we were sitting pretty good.
I went to work and i was severely injured. My employer refused to let me come back to work and retired me. Then the county I worked for started dragging their feet. It took 2 years to get retired.
My wife was diagnosed with cancer and the cancer had already spread. She had a surgery to remove the tumor. Then chemotherapy. That was followed by internal radiation. After 6 months of treatment the doctor pronounced her cancer free. However she got early menopause due to the surgery and radiation.
After a few months she started to plane out and resume her life. We had a couple of more months of happiness. Our middle son had been complaining of stomach/lower abdomen pain. So much so we took him to the emergency room and his GP. Nothing, just his diet we were told.
I got up one June morning and was preparing to enjoy the early summer day in June. I was off because I had taken a job teaching and we had plenty of money so we decided i would stay at home with the kids until school resumed for me. My son got up and told me he felt sick. I thought he was just trying to stay at home so I asked him to go to school and promised I would pick him up if he didn’t feel good.
Our little man of 12 years went to school. A couple hours later i went to get him, he was in the nurse’s office complaining of pain to his right side. We had thought it might be appendicitis. I took him to the emergency room. A test showed it wasn’t appendicitis. A CT scan showed he had a tumor above his large bowel. He was taken by ambulance to Valley Childrrns hospital. After a biopsy by surgery we were told he had Desmo Plastic Small Round Cell Tumor. His diagnosis was terminal. He had a surgery, and after recovery They started chemo. after 5 weeks my son told me he wanted to stop. I asked him to just go a little longer as the round of chemo was almost over. I promised him that if he didn’t get to feeling better I would agree with him to stop taking the chemo. He made it through. After a couple of more rounds of chemo he was sent to Stanford. At the Children’s Hospital there they harvested his stem cells, then chemo to kill all of what remained as well as starting a new chemo therapy plan. After several months he came home. My wife had been with him the entire time while I worked. We had lots of oroblems crop up and started fighting. Eventually we divorced. It hurt our kids. My little man stayed alive. A diagnosis of 6–8 weeks turned into 8.5 years. My wife asked me at the end to tell him he could pass now. He was so skinny, in so much pain. I told him. Nope, he wasn’t having it. He still wanted to live.. When he passed my wife and I finally apologized to eachother. We remarried. Now we have two kids who are married and 2 grand children.that was incredibly hard for me. I lost mycareerr (found another) and went through two major cases of cancer. I miss our son. What did I do to get through it? I finally pulled my head out of my ass realuzedad i want to be with the woman I loved and have our family together—and so did she.
There’s an internally-famous award that the White House gives—I can’t recall the name—but it is named after a guy who fell asleep during a meeting with the president.
I know of it because my dad almost got the award—he had a reputation of getting sleepy-eyed during meetings. But only because he works crazy hours.
In most offices, falling asleep at your desk—it will get you in trouble. Do it enough times—you’ll find yourself creating an account on Indeed (job site).
There are places for sleep—work is not that place.
But in Japan.
They actually see falling asleep at your desk as a sign of good diligence and work ethic.
“Wow—he must be working long hours.”
Some offices have even integrated nap times and nap rooms for workers. (Source: Napping in Public? In Japan, That’s a Sign of Diligence. NY Times. Rousseau, Bryant)
Inemuri (napping) is a permissible practice. You can even sleep in meetings where the president is present. They see you as still being in attendence.
Japan is a very different culture, though. They are among the hardest working people on the planet, with 23% working 80-hour weeks back to back. And 12% working 100+ hour weeks. (Source: Why Sleeping at Work in Japan is Actually a Good Thing. Samson, Carl)
But if you work 40 hours 5 minutes, don’t expect a promotion for your naps at your desk. Directions to the front door are more likely.
Note: I’ve only been to Dubai though – more of a city state.
It is almost entirely “style over content” in that it caters to Sun, service and visual stimulus only. There are no stories, anecdotes, historical perspectives, local colouring or human or philosophical insights to be gained whatsoever.
You absolutely cannot wander (too hot to be outside for long) down an ancient (everything is new) alleyway (there are none) to a local (nothing is “local”) bistro (none) to eat local fish (no local fish) paired with a local wine (all alcohol is served in either hotels or designated bars in malls) whilst watching the sunset (all alcohol is served inside so others cannot see it) and making friends with the locals (locals don’t speak and everyone else is transient).
You can go to largely empty sumptuous restaurants in hotels where you feel like a King, get driven there in a golf buggy by concierge alongside a candlelit stretch of water filled with lilies, eat great world cuisine and only have to slightly raise an eyebrow in the direction of a servant (sorry – waiter) to get their immediate serfdom (sorry – attention).
The whole place is like a mega shopping mall.
Dubai is both intellectually and creatively bankrupt.
My local farmer’s market has more sophistication.
Every single person I’ve met who liked it was low-IQ or very young but had somehow lucked into a job that paid enough for them to spend time there or someone else paid (although Dubai is not as expensive as popular myth would have you believe, you still need a decent wedge of cash/job to go there).
I have had more fun, authenticity and mind/soul expanding experiences on trips to Greece costing a fifth of the price.
Well, ask Dias Costa of Argentina. His home was invaded by a band of armed thugs who beat him to the ground. The 49-year-old man panicked when they dragged his wife into another room. He yanked a decorative samurai sword off the wall and started slicing. The men, armed with guns of various types, fled the house, and police were able to locate them by following the blood trail.
The car crashed a short distance later.
All four needed a LOT of stitches. For an untrained man with a decorative sword, he was pretty effective. I suspect this outcome would be pretty common when dealing with common thugs: Slice into the first one, and the rest will panic. Of course, the real point is that he was fully committed to the fight. He would have been effective with any weapon.
Just imagine what might have happened if he actually knew what he was doing?
A sword is a very effective weapon against unarmored targets.
Now, if you’re talking about using a sword to defend yourself against another guy with a sword, that’s a different story. That takes a lot of practice to do effectively (and not end up looking like one of the guys above).
For the medical student, first year is bad; the palpable frustration of trying to mug up hundreds of unpronounceable Latin names in anatomy, wasted effort to remember the ‘millisecond’ timings of a cardiac-cycle in physiology and the ‘spider-web’ structures of biochemistry make most students think if this was all worth it.
But at the start of clinical years, things change. I suppose the charm of ‘white coat’ is much more durable than the ego of the NEET rank.
Then on, mugging matters less, clinical skill starts separating students into categories. During teaching rounds, the guy who picks up the heart-murmur first or suspects the hint of finger clubbing or palpable spleen, that even the consultant did not pick up, is considered a hero of sorts. Most students want to pick up findings and be in the lime-light of tutors.
She was an average hard-working student all through but in the clinic, that suddenly seemed to change, especially during the medicine posting. While for most of us, the stethoscope was a piece of flaunting style; she would put the stethoscope on the patient’s chest, concentrate for a minute, smile and say ‘there is a systolic murmur; I can hear it clearly’
This frustrated most of us.
Most often even the consultants agreed. She was quickly known as ‘Ms. Murmur’ among the students.
For those uninitiated to medical terms, the heart produces two sounds called ‘lubb’ and ‘dup’; a ‘whosshhh’ kind of sound in between is called a murmur. A murmur occurs if a heart has a hole by-birth; or a valve is narrowed or leaking; and can range from super-soft to quite loud. While loud murmurs are picked up by the dumbest student, soft ones are a challenge.
But after a while, it started looking like a scam. Almost every patient she would claim to hear a murmur. Eventually, everyone started making fun of her. One day, after a harsh comment by a senior, she stopped announcing, but somehow, deep inside, I had a feeling that she was not telling a lie.
‘When I hear a murmur I say I hear. I don’t bluff’ she said softly.
One day in clinics, a new tutor was teaching us how to auscultate (listen with stethoscope) for murmurs over organs other than heart (abdomen, skull). In a normal patient, he showed us the areas where we need to place our stethoscope to pick up such murmurs (bruit).
Ms. Murmur placed her stethoscope on the abdomen of the patient, listened intently and her face lit up.
‘Yes sir I can hear the murmur’
‘But this case doesn’t have a murmur’ announced the tutor.
‘Sorry sir, I thought I heard it’ she mumbled, amidst laughter from the rest of our batch.
I felt bad.
Few days later I was reading an article on a rare condition called ‘arterio-venous malformations’ (AVM) in the brain. One clinical feature is, the patient can hear a bruitthemselves, when they close both ears, with the palm of their hand.
A stethoscope closes both our ears. It is possible that she herself has an …
Next morning, I told her to talk to our tutor.
Tutor to Professor, medicine to neurosurgery, X-ray skull to contrast CT scan; things moved fast. It was indeed an AVM. Her parents took her to Mumbai and got trans-catheter closure of AVM done.
No more murmurs, no more taunts.
(pic – CT scan of a large AVM – Google)
(AVMs are by-birth connection between arteries and veins and tend to grow like a tumour. They have a huge amount of blood flow through them. Common symptoms are headache and fainting. Because of continuous blood flow, they may hear a murmur if both their ears are physically blocked. They can be cured by injecting special material that clog the feeding arteries.)
Researchers did a landmark study on self-awareness using, of all things, a shopping cart.
They took a small cart and attached a blanket to the bottom of it. Then, mothers came in with their infants.
Researchers had infants stand behind the cart. Then, mothers urged their children to push the cart to them.
The infants grew frustrated as the blanket invariably stopped them from moving forward:
Some threw tantrums. Others looked around trying to figure out what was wrong. One infant even climbed into the cart out of frustration.
Some infants solved it.
One rolled the blanket up and pushed. Another got in front of the cart and pulled it to his mother.
Every infant who solved the problem had one thing in common: they were 16 months or older. Researchers discovered this is the point we first develop self-awareness.
From here, self-awareness is supposed to make our lives easier and more efficient — and it does. But it also becomes a source of immense pain and regret.
This is due to the Self-Absorption Paradox: as we become more self-aware, we make fewer social mistakes, but torture ourselves more over past mistakes.
Higher self-awareness is proven to cause greater psychological distress.
It even hurts our ability to socialize. We foresee mistakes before they happen and avoid interacting altogether.
I was fourteen years old, and I had just lost my virginity to gang rape. I went to my youth pastor for help, because I didn’t even know how to begin addressing my massive new trauma, and was suicidal.
He used a lot of flowery biblical language to blame me for having “gotten myself into that situation” (!!!), expressed his disappointment in me, and wanted me to “repent my sinful ways and get my heart right with God” so that God could love me as much as He loved all my virginal peers who hadn’t “chosen” to get gang raped.
I sat like a lump of clay through that day’s youth sermon, which consisted of the youth pastor exhorting every teen to be willing to sacrifice everything we owned for God, down to the clothes on our backs. And he meant literally, that we should all be prepared to go home and sack up everything we owned to be given away.
And when he went around the circle asking each of us if we were ready to “give it all away for Christ”, I couldn’t say yes like all the other “good” Christian kids, who hadn’t just suffered gang rape. The very thought of packing up my stuffed animals, which had helped me survive the previous night without ending my life, and having no comforts left to me except the comfort of a God who had ignored the men raping me and ignored my prayers to make them stop, was more than I could bear.
I said no, I wasn’t prepared to give up everything I owned for God. The youth pastor gave me a pitying look and said, “until you get your heart right with God, until you can be willing to sacrifice everything for Him, you are at risk of Hell. If you died today, with your soul unwilling to give it all away for Christ, you’d go to Hell.”
So much for salvation being unconditional and eternal, eh?
Many years ago, as in the late 1980s, I was off for the weekend and was about 350km from home when I collapsed with the most agonising pain a bloke can get.
Kidney stones.
My girlfriend drove me to hospital, where I was admitted. Doctors scratching their heads, but the floor coordinator (charge nurse) saw me as I staggered in, and said I had Kidney stones.
She was right. I was in strife allright, the one on the right was blocking the ureter, and urine was backing up AND the ureter was stretching.
This was a serious situation as my right kidney was under severe threat. The rock in the left kidney was still IN the kidney thankfully.
This was Saturday evening… so the next morning, my GF rang my work – my workpkace was seven days a week, and my boss worked Sundays.
She filled him in, and said I was slated for surgery Monday, and would be out of action for a week.
He was okay with that.
Monday comes, I go into theatre, and he rings the hospital demanding to know why I had failed to turn up for work, and would I be coming in tomorrow.
Needless to say, my GF had briefed staff about him, so they politely put him back in his box.
I never knew about it for a few days as I was too whacked out on painkillers.
He rang every day, mot to ask if I was okay, but to know when I was coming back, and they gave him the same answer: He will be back when he is fit to return.
When I did go back, he said he thought I was faking it to have a week off.
Twardy. You are a cretin. A soul less cretin.
America Signals The Unthinkable As US Debt Hits Record $34 TRILLION Dollars
Kind of……. A coworker was dating a girl in HR. He was trying to get me to start a business with him, but I simply had a bad vibe and did not trust him, so I put him off.
He comes to me one day, during a time when rumors of a layoff were circulating and told me I was on the layoff list, his GF had seen it and told him.
WTF?? So I go steaming into a managers office, after my immediate manager told me he knew nothing about this, ready for an unpleasant discussion.
He looks at me, “You are not on any list, where did you get this? I explained it to him. I expected my coworker and the HR girl to get pulled into the managers office and dressed down. Instead they put a 24 hour watch on the HR girls computer. Brainiac that she was, while having lunch with her BF, opened the personnel file of the CEO. Her manager and security were at her desk within minutes to escort both of them off the premises.
The rumors were true, the layoff dropped a couple weeks later. Best part, the coworker turned out to be the only casualty in our department. He actually tried a couple more time to get me to quit and work with him.
Piragi
Piragi are traditional Latvian filled mini-buns, commonly served at special occasions and holidays. They’re wonderful as an hors d’oeuvre, or with soup; serve at room temperature, or warm from the oven.
Ingredients
Dough
1 1/2 cups lukewarm water
1/2 cup + 1 tablespoon granulated sugar
1 tablespoon active dry yeast or 2 teaspoons instant yeast
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 tablespoon Lora Brody Dough Relaxer (optional, but very helpful)
5 to 6 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
Filling
4 slices bacon
1 tablespoon butter
1 medium onion, chopped
1 pound fully cooked ham steak, diced in 1/4-inch cubes (2 cups)
1 teaspoon caraway seeds
1 teaspoon black pepper, or to taste
Glaze
1 egg lightly beaten with 1 tablespoon water
Instructions
Dough: In a small bowl, dissolve the yeast and 1 tablespoon sugar in 1/2 cup of the water. Set aside. (If you’re using instant yeast, skip this step; add the yeast along with the flour.)
In a large mixing bowl, combine the remaining sugar, salt, and 2 1/2 cups of the flour.
Cut in the butter, then add the yeast mixture. Stir in enough of the remaining flour to make a soft dough.
Knead the dough on a lightly floured work surface until it’s smooth and elastic, about 5 minutes.
Place the dough in a large greased bowl, turning to grease the top, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise until doubled in size, about 1 1/2 hours. Prepare the filling while the dough is rising.
Filling: In a small pan over medium heat, cook the bacon. Drain it, chop, and set aside.
Sauté the onion in the butter until soft but not brown.
Add the ham, stirring until it’s combined with the onions. Stir in the caraway, pepper and bacon, and remove from the heat.
Assembly: Punch the dough down, and divide it into four pieces. Working with one piece at a time (cover the remaining pieces with plastic wrap), roll each piece of dough into a 1/8-inch thick circle. If the dough “fights back” (the dough relaxer helps prevent this), give it a 5-minute rest, and resume rolling.
Use a cookie cutter to cut the dough into 2 3/4-inch rounds. Place 1 teaspoon of the filling mixture into the center of each round, fold in half (to make a half-moon shape), and pinch the edges closed.
Place the piragi on greased or parchment-lined cookie sheets. Shape them into crescents, and brush with the egg wash.
Bake the piragi in a preheated 375 degrees F oven for 10 to 15 minutes, or until golden brown.
Remove them from the oven, and cool on a wire rack.
My mother-in-law was a terrific cook and she taught her son to be a terrific cook.
I am a decent cook, not fancy but you get full if I feed you.
Anyhoodle.
My mother-in-law was tired of my boring fare. When I was at work, she decided to ‘help’ and cook dinner. At this time her vision wasn’t wonderful, she was on dialysis, and tired very easily.
More than once I came home to find all four burners on and dried, burned food in the pans.
I didn’t care about the food or how long the burners may have been on (usually hours), I was worried about HER. What if a fire had started? What if she put her hand down on the hot burner?
In the end, I took off the knobs on the stovetop every morning. Every evening, when she was up to it, I got cooking lessons. I will never reach her level of expertise. It was actually a nice way for us to bond.
Getting China Wrong: The U.S Would Lose the War with China
Driving home with my wife after grocery shopping in the late evening, I suddenly see police car lights flash on behind me and the inevitable ‘WHOOP WHOOP!’
“Oh God, what now,” I said. I pulled over and waited. I saw the officer get out and slowly start walking up to my car. Other cars are slowly going by, drivers looking at me. I looked at my wife and shrugged.
I put the window down and the cop bent down, leaned on the window ledge and looked in. It was my brother in law.
“Hi,” he smiled, “don’t you feel stupid?” Then he laughed. I didn’t feel stupid but greatly relieved.
“Hi Leigh, is this fellow looking after you?” he said looking at his sister..
“Hi Brucie,” said she, “yes, he always does,” she said smiling.
“He looked at me and asked if I was going to be home the next day. I said yes. He said he was going to pop in for a visit and said he had a load of firewood he was going to drop off for me. Bruce lived out in the country and had lots of trees on his lot. He always brought firewood in for me, maple mostly, which was nice of him.
“I’ll have the scotch ready Bruce,” I said.
So that was funny. I thought I was going to get a ticket for something and it was my brother in law the cop. Big dude. I wouldn’t want to be on his bad side.
My wife’s father was a District Fire Chief and he’d get chauffeured around in a fire department vehicle. He’d often stop at our house and pop in to say high or if my boys were playing soccer he’d stop off and watch a bit.
About 15 years ago, I was the owner, operator, and sole employee of a mobile repair business. I mostly fixed lawn and garden equipment – lawn mowers, weed whackers, chain saws, and whatnot – but would fix just about anything when asked to.
I can’t tell you how many times I went to someone’s house to fix a push mower that had “just quit working” for no apparent reason. Very often the no apparent reason was that the customer had run over some object, be it a tree stump or surveyor’s stake, the customer never knew somehow, they just knew the mower suddenly stopped.
The manufacturers of these machines knew that hitting a solid object with the blade can do great damage, so they designed said machines with a weak point – a flywheel key that would shear off under extreme shock, preventing serious damage. Sometimes, but not always, the blade would be bent too, but usually they had just sheared the flywheel key. This was such a common occurrence that I carried about 25 flywheel keys in the van at all times.
I would always tell the customer that they had hit something with their mower, and that for a total of $30, including tax, I would replace the key and their mower would be as good as new in about 30 minutes.
I can’t tell you how many times the following conversation happened:
Oh, I don’t know. Could you just haul it off for me?
I promise you, this machine will be as good as it was before this happened. They’re made this way to protect the machine.
No, I think I’ll just buy a new one.
I can haul it away, but are you sure? There’s nothing really wrong with it that a three dollar part and 30 minutes won’t take care of.
No, I think I just want it gone.
Okay, if you’re sure.
They would go spend $250 or more on a new mower, and I would spend 50 cents (my cost for the part) and sell the mower to someone for $50.
When I had the repair service, I made more money in this scenario than almost any other. There’s a big market for used lawn mowers.
A couple of decades ago, I landed at LAX and took the shuttle to the rental car office. It was pretty late at night, and there was only one other customer ahead of me in line.
The guy in front of me was making a scene, complaining about not getting the specific car model and color he wanted and demanding a free upgrade. He even went so far as to insult the rental agent personally. Despite the rude behavior, the rental agent remained remarkably patient and eventually convinced the customer to accept what he had originally reserved. The disgruntled customer stormed out, leaving behind a tense atmosphere.
When it was my turn, I immediately apologized for the unpleasant behavior of the previous customer. I acknowledged that there was no excuse for such rudeness, and the rental agent thanked me for my understanding. He checked his computer screen, confirmed my reservation for a simple small sedan, and then paused.
After a moment of thought, he asked, “Would you prefer a minivan for the same price?” (Minivans were relatively new at that time.)
I declined, explaining that it was just me, and I didn’t need that much space. The rental agent clicked a few more keys and then asked, “How about a hybrid?” (Another new technology at the time.)
I chuckled and said, “Thanks, but after 16 hours of flying, I’m not ready for any new technology.”
Then, with a twinkle in his eye, he looked straight at me and asked, “How about a Mustang convertible?”
Within ten minutes, I found myself cruising up the Pacific Coast Highway in a brand-new red convertible with black leather seats, only 63 miles on the odometer, the top down, the moon shining, my own CDs playing in the stereo—all at the cost of a small Toyota. In that moment, I couldn’t help but think, “Damn! I like this world!”
“I investigated the UFO event in Peru and what I found SHOCKED me” Timothy Alberino | Redacted
In the nineties, once I flew from Moscow to Delhi in Aeroflot, the Russian National Airlines.
Could be my fourth or fifth flight in life.
My ears ached due to the cabin pressure as the flight took off.
After a while, it hurted a lot, and I requested the Ruski airhostess to help me.
She smiled, went to the galley, and returned with half a glass of cold sparkling Sprite.
I was upset, and cried ‘Look Miss, I am in pain. It hurts really bad. I was expecting some tablet or ear drops. Here you come with a glass of Sprite as if I asked a mix for Vodka’.
She hushed me and told me, ‘Davai Davai, prostho dhrink’.
I took a few sips reluctantly, and ‘hufff’ went my ears, cleared of pressure and pain, instantaneously!!
I could not control my blush, and thanked her many times, ‘You are a genius. Spaciba Dharagoi’
Wherever she is, God continue to bless her, and the thousands of other angels flying in skies, to keep us in comfort and safety while flying!
The very first time was when I was four years old.
I found out I was something I hated.
My parents got pregnant with my older sister, and then married, at fifteen. I was their second child, conceived at sixteen. (Ahh, the excesses of youth!)
My father found a way to join the military when my Mom was pregnant with me; I was born stateside but within months we were stationed in Hawaii.
They were seventeen, and the lowest rank and poorest. My father worked two full time jobs, my mother was a full time waitress. The place we lived was actually in the poorest part of Hawaii, amongst native Hawaiians. In this neighborhood, kids ran about, in and out of houses, cared for by Tutu wahines, “grandmothers”. If you got hurt, got hungry, had to go to the bathroom, just go into the nearest house and Tutu will take care of you.
I was bilingual then, I spoke fluent Hawaiian like all my friends. One day, in a tutu’s house, she was giving us four of us kids sliced fruit, and the radio was on. I don’t know what it said, but Tutu said, “I hate haoles.” [pronounced ‘howlie’].
Now I had learned by osmosis that the Haole were the white men without breath, meaning they were liars and cheats. They stole our islands.
I said, “I hate haoles too!”
Tutu laughed and hugged me, she said, in Hawaiian, “I’m sorry child, you ARE a Haole. I should not have said that.”
For four year old me, that was just mind-spinning. I told my father, and asked him if it were true. Weren’t we Hawaiians? Because I didn’t lie or cheat or steal anything.
But he told me yes, it was true, we were white, like the evil men that stole Hawaii, but that did not mean we had to be evil like them. That even if people thought we might be evil like those men, because we are white like them, we still had to choose to be good people.
My seventh-grade English teacher was pregnant. She burst into tears one day because being seventh-graders, we were being little idiots and paying no attention to her. It was the first time I had seen a teacher cry, which was probably true for most of the students.
She was clearly embarrassed, even while sobbing her eyes out. Some kids went up and hugged her and/or apologized. I didn’t. I don’t remember why. She then wiped her eyes and went on with the lesson. I might add that despite being idiots, we were decent kids, on the whole, and she had no more trouble from us for the rest of the year.
My eighth-grade year was equal parts wonderful and just batshit insane. I saw two of my favorite teachers cry.
For background, my eighth-grade English teacher was borderline obsessed with Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird (and as far as I know still is). She’s one of the reasons I love the novel.
On February 19th, 2016, a student walked into her class very casually and said, “Hey, did you know that Harper Lee died today?” Then he took a look at her face and left.
She sat down and just kind of overflowed. Her co-teacher, who had been placed in our class for reasons that would be a whole other answer, tried to console her. It was hopeless. We didn’t get anything else done that day.
In this last example, she didn’t actually cry, but I think it still counts.
My Algebra 1 teacher is one of the most incredible women I have ever met. She’s almost six feet tall and rather intimidating, but also an inspiring, capable teacher and a sweet, wonderful person.
This particular incident happened on a Friday. We were the last block of the day, and were working on an assignment. I was in the front row, done, and rather bored.
The teacher got a text. She glanced at her phone, looked away, did a double take and looked back at the text, then picked up the phone and read it.
The color literally drained from her face. I didn’t know that was a thing outside of books until then.
She then stuffed the phone into her purse and stood up abruptly. She started talking about the assignment, but her voice was all wrong – cracking and breathy.
Finally someone spoke for us all and asked her if she was all right.
“No,” she said. “But I will be, and you guys need to learn this, so pay attention.”
She finished the lesson. She told us, mind you, that six squared is thirty-eight and that eight by nine is seventy-five. But she finished the lesson.
We found out on Monday that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. She was sixty years old at the time.
“Oh, honey, there’s no point in crying,” she told me later. “It doesn’t fix anything, and it just tires you out.”
She did recover eventually, but that, again, is a story for another time.
I used to work on grocery store systems about 20 years ago, and we had a non-contract time/materials customer call us about his store server, which had crashed in a bad way. I drove out, and I recognized the server model as one we were selling/installing about 5 years prior, before I was with the company. It would be a two-drive mirrored proprietary RAID and a cartridge tape backup.
When I tried to boot it, it rolled through cmos and then complained about a missing driver. So, I booted off a diagnostic diskette, and there…. one drive corrupted beyond repair, other drive missing entirely.
I opened the case, knowing now I was going to be replacing hardware. Yeah… second drive was completely disconnected, no power, no data cables. I plugged it back in out of curiosity and powered it up and shut it down again 5 seconds later. There was a reason why the drive was disconnected, it was screaming bloody murder… loud!
The store owner had been watching me like a hawk because… time and materials… and he remembered, another tech had been there a few years earlier for the noise and convinced the owner he didn’t need RAID because he had a tape drive.
Sh!t. That meant two new drives, which I had with me, and a cold reload from diskettes far enough for an OS and the tape drive drivers. And many many prayers that at one of his backups was valid. Those little tape cartridges were not reliable in a good environment. A server sitting under a desk for years with no maintenance? Of course all the tapes were bad.
I won’t go through the rest, there was a way to retrieve and convert some data from a register, and we pieced enough together for him to do his end-of-day processes… it being night now and everything. The rest he would have to hand-key, so his night was just getting started.
He and our manager went back and forth about the bill a few weeks later. The tech that told him it would be ok was from our shop but long gone now. If memory serves, he ended up paying for the drives and half of the labor.
Techs these days have no idea how easy it is now with such reliable hardware.
The Phantom Planet (1961) Science-Fiction | Full movie
Guys, this is a whole new world. And there are changes and revolutions and adjustments everywhere. But you will see, in the next month or so of my posts that the AI revolution is here. And it is both awesome and frightening.
Today, consider the text to video technology that is out there.
Six videos. Watch all of them. You will know when you watch them why I am so freaking out. Imagine what a desperate, corrupt and evil government or corporation could do with this technology!!!!!
-MM
We start with an overview. The next three videos…
AI Generated Videos Just Changed Forever
No shit!
Can you tell what’s real? – AI Generated Videos
You Can’t Trust Any Video Anymore… (OpenAI Sora)
Now, lets really get into the details of Sora.
Amazing!
OpenAI Sora: All Demo Videos with Prompts | Upscaled 4K
And, guys… that’s not all!
It’s a race with everyone competing against each other…
Massive Midjourney V6 Update: Consistent Style is Finally Here!
Image to Video Comparison: Pika vs Runway | Who Wins?
Yesterday, out of the blue at dinner time, a delivery man came to our door with a bouquet of lilies. Not for me. Not for the kids. Not for the wife. Mistake, I guess. But the address was exactly our address.
Strange.
A lily flower has different significance in China than it does in the USA. In the USA, lilies are associated with death and funerals.
So obviously, I looked at the delivery guy with a big exclamation point and question mark over his head. Wouldn’t you? Especially since I was in MAJ. Things that make you go hum…
Anyways…
I asked the Domain Commander about this.
DC told me that it was a real accident and not to worry. Sure there are elements in the world that would like me to die and collapse in a most horrible way, but they are far removed from me, and that I am protected. That I should not let my fears grasp my emotions.
The funny thing is, I hadn’t met girls or women who I’d consider shallow until I began my PhD. Most of the girls and women in my life were strong, independent, no nonsense girls, who took their lives on by the horns.
However, once I started my PhD, it was as though I was overcompensated for what I had missed out all along. There was a flurry of girls and women I kept bumping into, who made me question their true worth and leave me in total disgust.
Well, without much ado, here’s introducing the creme de la creme
A top woman scientist who told me to do an MBA after my PhD because girls only marry men with fat wallets because sex is not everything
A PhD research scholar who intends to marry a man who earns at least ₹500000 (~$8000) a month so that he could spend at least half of that on her
Another PhD scholar who plans to quit working after she got married because it was her husband’s duty to take care of her
A research scholar who blows up about ₹25,000 a month on partying, clothes, and weekend holidays and then takes another ₹10,000 from home because she’s the only daughter and it was “her right” to be pampered
Research scholars who even in their 3rd year of research do not possess fundamental concepts of their research because, “we’re not nerds like you!”
A research scholar who called her roommate’s mother a whore just for speaking to a guy outside their apartment. Her roomie’s mother had passed away a few months back to cancer
Another PhD scholar who said “I’m a Lingayat,” when I asked her if she was non-vegetarian. Lingayat, turns out, is a caste quite popular in Karnataka and I had no idea until she laughed when I asked her what that was
Another research scholar who’d draw a stipend from her supervisor’s project and yet work entirely for someone else because she had the support of a lot of higher ups
A research scholar who threatened a guy who kept asking her a genuine scientific doubt during one of her presentations. She wasn’t able to answer the question properly and was subsequently cross questioned. Frustrated, she said “I’ll file a harassment charge with the police. I’m a girl and my father has money. Let’s see who they believe.”
Wow! I just realized I could keep going at this. It’s crazy the number of PhD’s who think and speak this way.
What’s the use of having an education when you’re not one bit educated!
I see so much in this kitten that reminds me of my deceased dog
Spareribs and Cabbage (Zeberka Wieprzowena z Kapusta — Poland)
Serve with mashed or boiled potatoes.
Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
4 1/2 pounds fresh pork spareribs, cut into 6 pieces
1 large onion, sliced
1 large carrot, sliced
2 teaspoons instant beef bouillon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon caraway seed
1/4 teaspoon coarsely ground pepper
1 bay leaf
2 cups water
1/2 cup vinegar
1 small head green cabbage, cut into 6 wedges
Freshly-ground pepper
Instructions
Heat oil in Dutch oven until hot. Cook pork spareribs, a few pieces at a time, over medium heat until brown on all sides, about 15 minutes; drain fat.
Add onion, carrot, bouillon, salt, caraway seed, 1/4 teaspoon pepper and the bay leaf.
Pour water and vinegar over pork mixture. Heat to boiling; reduce heat. Cover and simmer for 1 1/2 hours.
Add cabbage; sprinkle with pepper. Cover and simmer until cabbage is tender, about 45 minutes.
Remove bay leaf.
Arrange spareribs and vegetables on serving platter.
Garnish with minced parsley if desired.
Waiting to Be Put to Sleep, She Sat Crying Silently in Her Cage At the Shelter
A large company you have heard of needed to lay some people off. There was this one guy who always came in, went to his office, did who knows what all day, then went home. Nobody really knew what he did. His manager had been replaced with a new guy who was still figuring out which way is up. He had to lay off X number of people from his group. He laid off this guy.
Then they found out what he did, because it wasn’t being done anymore. Turns out he was providing exclusive customized support to a very large customer on a very lucrative contract.
The customer was not happy. They were no longer getting the support they were paying for.
I know other people who work at the same company. Management knows what they do, so their jobs are secure. It’s amazing how your job security depends on the right people knowing what you do.
2) Someone I know worked for a company that provides services to the military. The company was bought by another company, which put in management that had college degrees but no knowledge or experience in that field. The existing management, which had specific knowledge and experience, was laid off because they did not have college degrees.
That company was known by the military to be able to complete contracts that other companies had failed to complete.
With the team of experts gone, they could no longer complete contracts or train new hires. They had laid off their key people.
Meanwhile, the experts got jobs with competing companies, who were now able to complete contracts.
As contractor pay has stagnated, companies have been sold, and management has been unable to pay decently. A welder or electrician can make 400% more working anywhere else.
The team of experts has bounced from company to company. Whichever company they’re with is able to complete contracts.
How does this story end? That remains to be seen.
In the meantime, we have a navy ship that has been in for repairs for over two years, for work that should have taken only six months.
50% is terrible odds
16 mind-blowing psychology facts you should know:
Hearing your name when on one is calling you, is actually a sign of a healthy brian.
Sleep directly after studying, you will remember what you have learned better.
Don’t argue through text messages. The lack of tone decreases the meaning of the words.
People are more honest when physically tired. This is why most people confess things during late night conversations.
Those who look outside, dream. Those who look inside, awaken.
Cherophobia: the fear of happiness. People with this cherophobia believe that every time they feel happy, something bad will happen and ruin it.
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
The most powerful way to win an argument is by asking questions. It can make people see the flaws in their logic.
It’s possible to die from a broken heart. It’s called Stress Cardiomypathy.
Being forgetful can be a sign of a higher intelligence.
Athazagoraphobia: the fear of being forgotten or ignored by someone who you strongly care about.
When ignored by someone who means a lot to you, the reaction in your brain is similar to physical pain.
Boys are actually more emotionally affected by relationship troubles than girls. They just know how to hide it well.
You’re more likely to be easily attracted to someone you have no chance with.
The average man gets bored of shopping after 26 minutes.
If you want someone to listen to you, start the conversation with” I shouldn’t be telling you this”
The Most Paranormal Place On Earth – What’s Happening on Mount Shasta?
This happened a week back exactly and it’s been running on my mind ever since then. I never thought something like this would happen to me, don’t know why.
Last week, I was on a business trip to Berlin and I went to Amsterdam for the weekend, for a short vacation. My return flight to India was from Berlin and so I took a bus from Amsterdam to Berlin Tegel airport (bus because it was cheaper!). I had to switch buses at a place called Hamburg and I had a layover of almost 3 hours.
These 3 hours were the most tiring 3 hours of my life because it was from 10–1 in the night and it was freezing cold outside. And, I was standing alone for so long. Finally the bus came at 12.45 and I was the last one to board the bus. The bus was full and all the seats were taken in the lower deck. The upper deck had only 3 seats.
Super exhausted, I politely ask this girl if I can take the vacant seat next to her and this is how the conversation goes –
Me – Hi, can I please sit here?
Girl – No
Me – I’m sorry, excuse me?
Girl – I want to sit alone. Find another place
I ask the girl in the front seat if I can sit next to her and she was like, “this seat is taken”
Me, again to the girl from before –
Me – There’s no other seat. Can I sit here?
Girl – Go see if there are any seats down
*She was getting on to my nerves*
Me – I’m coming from down, there’s no seat. I’m sorry
Girl – Ask the girl in the front
Me – I just asked her, she said it’s taken. If you want, go ahead and ask her
*By now, people were already looking at me and I was feeling embarrassed. I ignored her and took the seat*
Girl (after 5 mins) – Actually, I don’t feel comfortable about you sitting next to me
Me (I was shocked) – Sorry?
Girl – I feel very uncomfortable about you sitting next to me. Please understand. Don’t sit here, go away!
Me (I lost it) – You know what? There’s no other place. Shut the fuck up and sit! Don’t irritate the fuck out of me!
I don’t think I have ever been this rude to anyone in my life. But, I don’t feel bad about saying it and I never will. I said it, I was rude to her, like she was rude to me. But, I was shocked even after that, my eyes welled up.
For the entire 3 hours, she was giving all these reactions and making faces like she was sitting next to someone disgusting.
And the worst part was, the vacant seat in the front, itwas taken by none.
I don’t know if this is racism and if this happened to me because I’m brown and not white. But, this same female was okay with another white girl sitting next to her. While I was walking towards the seat, another white girl was going to sit there but she found another seat.
When I told this incident to a colleague of mine, he told me that I’m jumping into a conclusion that this is racism.
I don’t know if it could be anything else. Because I was dressed up well. I’m someone who gives importance to getting dressed up. This picture below is from the same day morning. I was in the same attire, maybe with a coat on top of it –
A girl I graduated high school with got a full scholarship to The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. That’s the big UNC… The world-renowned UNC… The one that most of my graduating class was trying to get into. She not only got in, but had a free ride thanks to a combination of cheerleading scholarships and needs-based grants.
She drank and partied her way to failure her first semester, was put on academic probation, didn’t recover, and was back home living with her parents and working as a waitress by the time she was 20.
She was still smoking hott* though, and it all worked out for her. “It” tends to work out for women like her… Women with model-quality looks and bubbly personalities. She married a lawyer and is now a stay-at-home (a beach house, no less) mother who, judging from what she posts on Facebook, lives an enviable life.
As for me, I have one huge wasted opportunity that I know about.
When I was 23, I’d already spent years working for families with special needs children in the wealthy suburbs of Chicago. I ended up with a job as a special needs assistant for the local school district… a very desirable school district for teachers. Also one of the hardest school districts in which to get hired for any position. I only got hired as an aide because one of the parents on the school board knew me because I sometimes took care of his special-needs kid.
Most of the other aides were teachers-in-training. I hadn’t considered going back to school to be a teacher at that point in my life. An opportunity to go to work for a friend in the auto parts business and make slightly more money presented itself, and I quit my job with the school district mid-year.
That’s a huge no-no in education. You never quit mid-year. I burned that bridge to the ground. I lost contact with all of the people I knew in the district. Dozens of networking opportunities squandered, all for about $100 extra dollars per month.
Years later, I finally went back to college and got my teaching certificate. I was 30 by then, and I struggled to find a teaching job. It was all about who you knew that could get your resume in front of the principals, and I didn’t know anyone who could do that anymore.
Had I been patient and stayed on as an aide for a few more years, I would have been first in line for an open teaching position in that district when they became available.
If this were my 10th year of teaching in that district, I’d be making three times what I make now, and have a lot more perks.
Oh well. Youthful impatience has done a lot worse to other people.
Chimps are not monogamous. In fact, they gang-rape each female. The females do this so that no male knows who the father is, preventing the infant from being killed. Just because animals do it doesn’t mean we should.
Gorillas have harems. Most males never mate, those that do dominate a group of females and have exclusive rights to them. This precludes equal rights for females. Go to a harem model, and you’ve just undone the basic premise for women’s rights.
Monogamy and systematic encouragement of it forced men to treat their only sexual partner with decency and respect for their quality of life. This is why only the Christian West gave women equal legal rights to men across the board. If men can have sex outside of marriage, whether sex slaves or prostitutes, the woman’s social status goes down.
Society has a vested interest in monogamy. Single mothers are even in the rich West at greater odds of poverty. Even worse is the three to four times greater odds of bad life outcomes for their kids. From drug addiction to joining a gang to not finishing school to committing suicide to being a single teen mother, the odds are 3–4 times greater if raised by a single mother.
If society wants to reduce criminal behavior, reliance on welfare (if it exists) and dependent adults, it has to encourage monogamy. The group cannot afford to encourage the breakdown of the family. You don’t get happy hippie communes; you get violent inner cities with stubborn inter-generational poverty in communities that used to have declining poverty rates.
Yes, humanity is biologically transitioning from “harem/free sex” to “monogamous”, so we have conflicting impulses. But we’ve been moving toward monogamy for literally millions of years. We know that because women are only 20% smaller than men versus half the size of a male as occurs in gorillas. It is driven by our higher intelligence and the longer dependent period of human infants.
Monogamy is in our best interest as individuals, as parents and as a society. And that’s why we encourage it.
I had eye surgery in winter 2019, and had to wear dark glasses (the ones in my pic) for a bit.
My eyesight is terrible anyway, but for a couple of months l could barely see.
One evening, as usual, I was taking a long walk in London – couldn’t run, I’d have been running in to street furniture- for exercise. Earbuds in, listening to music.
A beggar stepped in front if me & said something about money. I put my hand in my pocket, handed him a quid.
He said something about wanting more, l couldn’t really hear him too well over Black Grape, but this pissed me off.
“Fuck off”, I said, “you can have a quid and like it”
“Gimme more. I want all your money”
“You cheeky cunt. Fuck off or I’ll take the quid back and kick your arse” l said.
He made angry gestures and stormed off.
A bloke came up beside me…. “…mate, are you ok?” he said.
“Yeah… why?”
“He had a knife”.
Oh. Not beggar; mugger. I hadn’t seen the knife.
The mugger must have thought I was like Chuck Norris, fronting him out like that.
New Upgrade: China J-35 Fighter JET To Fly From Aircraft Carrier
Not a General (or Admiral in this case, since I served in the Navy), but a Captain (equivalent of a full bird Colonel in the other services).
I joined on the delayed entry program when I was still a senior in high school. Toward the end of my senior year, I was awarded a scholarship to state university. There was a banquet to honor all the scholarship recipients.
Even though I knew I couldn’t accept the scholarship because I was already set to go into the Navy, I thought it would be fun and interesting to attend a banquet that was being held partly in my honor.
At the banquet, I met and made small talk with a Navy Captain. I told him about how I wouldn’t be able to use the scholarship because I had already enlisted via the delayed entry program. I never got his name and never heard from, nor spoke with, him ever again after that night.
So technically, I don’t know with any certainty that he was the one who did anything for me. But 30+ years later, it’s still the only explanation that makes any sense.
A week or two after the banquet, I got a phone call from the recruiting office. They wanted me to come in and sign some paperwork. When I arrived, they had two “identical” enlistment packets sitting on a table. The recruiter explained to me that they were going to let me out of my enlistment contract and go into the reserves instead so that I could go to college.
Even at 17 years old, I knew that the government never just lets anyone cancel a legal and binding contract. This was a really huge deal. Somebody pulled some serious strings.
I have told this story before, but I got married young at 24. We were in med school. We did not have a honeymoon, and it was a major fight to get the weekend off and permission to take an exam a day early. Then in residency we both worked 100 + hours per week for years. YEARS. We were not guaranteed to get vacation on the same week. We were not guaranteed a single day off in the month, including weekends. One of my fellow residents gave birth to premature twins. The babies were in an ICU in another STATE so her parents could be in the hospital because there was no family leave. I was repeatedly told not to get pregnant, which would be hard to do if you never sleep, let alone sleep in the same room on the same night as your partner.
Fast forward to maybe age 30. I saw a TV commercial about “the best part of waking up” and it showed a couple on their porch watching the sun rise and drinking some brand of coffee. I started to cry because I had never sat with my husband on my porch or had coffee in the morning together. That was kind of the moment I realized exactly what I had signed up for.
I think things are getting much better for young doctors but for us it was not great. People have NO IDEA what some of us have gone through to be “rich doctors.” Especially if you started out poor and had no outside help or support from family.
I worked for a ‘charity’ in Wakefield, England. A miserable place with many dubious business practices, run by a egotistical idiot. One day most of my team – conspicuously all those of a particular ethnicity – was pulled into his office and told we would probably be losing our jobs and would have to reapply for them. Given the decisive nature of who had been picked, it was obvious we wouldn’t get them when we ‘reapplied’: the company is notorious for their nepotism and they no doubt had replacements – friends and family – already lined up. Needless to say, the mood turned sour in the room. Then the kicker – the absolute collosal utter bellend of a boss legitimately couldn’t tell why we were angry. His exact words: “Come on guys, why are you so down? Let’s have a good day. Big smiles guys, big smiles.”
Had a stressful month looking for work afterward, but now in a great job and glad to see the back of that dump. And of course the people he lined up to fill our posts made a right mess of it (though sadly the company survived).
Can US citizens do 4 times better than Chinese citizens?
Think about this from 1980 to 2020 alone, China grew 30 times in 40 years in real income! What will happen between 2020 to 2060? Say it just grow 10 times that of 2020! It will leave the US trailing miles away!
Chinese people are innovating more, Chinese produce more STEM engineers a year more that the entire U.S. STEM sector! Chinese works twice as hard as American’s, they are highly intelligent and very productive and discipline. Every years China’s savings alone is as big as the entire UK economy! It already has the best infrastructure amongst major economies.
For China to stay still is never going to happen. Period. To me China will grow to 5–6 times the U.S. in real economy!
Expert REVEALS Evidence of Super ADVANCED LOST Ancient Technology!
It didn’t happen right away, but a year or so later, I met her again, and after some standard comical clumsiness, I asked her out.
Knowing based on what she did for a living that she was science nerdy like me, I planned a date to the Perot Museum of Nature and Science
. (Note to guys, this is a BRILLIANT idea. It’s not just that you’re showing respect for her intellect, it also gives you several hours to walk around, have a TON of stimulating things to talk about, and get to know each other.)
Day of the date arrives, her Dad’s in the hospital, so we agree to meet there, so I can visit him too. Hilarious side story, as we’re about to leave, she says, Ok, Dad, see you later, do you want me to turn off your light? “No,” Dad says, “Chris can turn it off when he leaves.” Uh, Bob?” I replied “….(Extended awkward pause….) I’m going with her….”
So we decide to leave her car in the Hospital parking lot and take my car to the museum. Get in the car, turn it on, doors lock, car goes into drive and starts rolling and I say:
“So you know I’m still married, right?”
Have you ever heard that metaphorical record scratch in real life?
Well. I QUICKLY explained to her that we had been separated for about 8 years, that the upcoming law called “The Affordable Care Act” would make it so that she could get insurance despite her pre-existing neuro-vascular disease, and that the only reason we were still married was so that she could stay on my corporate health insurance until that was the case. (In other words, I QUICKLY demonstrated that “I’m a VERY nice guy.”)
It calmed the fire down to the point where we were able to have a VERY nice date…didnt’ QUITE get together just then… a few breaks…not the right time…I was seeing someone else…then she was…and then…
The Stars Aligned.
Yup. I married the Girl who listened to me drop the WORST line you could possibly drop on a first date.
C’est l’amour, no?
Sanctioning China? US is as stupid as the Qing Dynasty Emperor
When you sign up for anything online, put the website’s name as your middle name. That way when you receive spam/advert email, you will know who sold your information.
If you’re on a first date and aren’t connecting with the other person or feel they’re dull, ask them what job they’d choose if money wasn’t an issue. It initiates a talk about one’s passions, which are rarely dull and are simple to connect.
Do not try to be the man your father would want you to be. Be the man you would like your son to be be. It more clearly defines your own convictions, desires, goals, and motivates you to be your best.
Pay Attention to the smell of your home when you come back from a trip – that’s what it smells like to guests all the time, you just get used to it.
When a friend is upset, ask them one simple question before saying anything else: ‘Do you want to talk about it or do you want to be distracted from it?’
No matter how much your workplace pushes “team building” and “family culture” – remember, they’re not your friends and it’s still a workplace.
If you’re stuck on an annoying call, put your phone on airplane mode instead of just hanging up. The other person will see “call failed” instead of “call ended”.
If you want to learn a new language, figure out the 100 most frequently used words and start with them. Those words make up about 50% of everyday speech, and should be a very solid basis.
The Circleville Letters Mystery | Why can’t we solve this?
Pork Sausage Loaf (Hungary)
Ingredients
1 cup diced mushrooms
2 tablespoons butter
1 egg, beaten
1 pound fresh bulk pork sausage
2 cups dry bread crumbs
1 teaspoon paprika
Instructions
Melt butter in a skillet and add mushrooms. Sauté.
Combine sausage, mushrooms, egg and crumbs and shape into a loaf. Sprinkle with paprika. Place in a small roaster; cover.
Bake at 350 degrees F for 1/2 hour.
Uncover, return to oven, and bake 30 more minutes.
Serves 4
10+ Mind-Blowing Psychological Tricks & Facts That Everyone Should Know
Here are 17 psychological tricks to be more likable and 16 psychology facts you should know:
Posture matters: If you stand up straight and make an eye contact while talking to the people you are attracted to, will make you more confident and attractive.
Have a strong sense of humor: It is thought to be a sign of intelligence. this is why, when assessing a potential partnepsyr, we tend to be more attracted to those who are funny.
Start the conversation first: Women are automatically attracted to guys who start the conversation, take initiative, and make them laugh.
…and always be the one to pull away from the conversation: It shows that you value your time and have other stuff to do. If you cut short your conversation, the other person always wants more of it. It creates attraction.
Deeper voice: Men with deeper voices are more likely to make a lasting impression on women than men with higher voices.
Create sexual tension without touching: It is done subtly, and by flirting. It creates instant attraction if you do it correctly.
7. Never approach women from behind or from her sides. It looks sneaky. Approach her face-to-face. It displays more confidence.
8. Wear red: People subconsciously believe that women who wear red are more attractive and sexy, in 2010, Eliot confirmed that people will sit closer to women who wear red dresses.
9. Let others talk about themselves – it’s as rewarding as sex: If you want to make your conversation partner feel good, get them talking about themselves and their interests. Which will make people feel valued and they will be more impressed by you
10. If you’re a woman, a man will like you if you can make him feel masculine. No instructions, no advice and give him ample space.
11. If you’re a man, a woman will like you if you can make her feel beautiful, not just sexy. A high emotional quotient is also critical for a woman.
12. Do not speak badly about others as this creates distrust.
13. Do not spread false rumors and do not make accusations.
14. When with a group of people, including everyone in the conversation. Never leave anybody out.
15. Share the little you have with those who have nothing.
16. Become a happy person and wear a smile always.
17. Laugh with all. Don’t discriminate. Be gender sensitive.
US Heartbreak: Mexico Chooses China for Auto Future – Is It the End?
When I worked at the local university bar there was this guy called Mick. He was a down to earth guy who spoke in a working class accent. He always said that his dad was a miner. We socialised quite a bit over the three years that he studied for his degree. Then when it was his graduation I was invited and I met and sat with his parents. Obviously well off by the clothes that they wore. Anyhow, Mick’s mother was chatting to me and aske me who I was I told her that I was her son’s barman for the past three years. She asked “did he tell you that his father owns six mines in Yorkshire?”
I replied “no”. She said, “He’s such an inverted snob, How did you find him?”
I replied that I found him sociable, down to earth and a decent guy. I got a hug for that and an invitation to their home in the summer break.
It was like a bloody castle with footmen and butlers.
But, yes they were such a lovely, nice, down to earth family.
I’m standing by my Dad as I am casually playing on my phone.
Suddenly, he reaches over and snatches my phone out of my hands, eyeing the screen.
“Dad what are you doing?” I ask, surprised.
“Just checking” he replies, handing it back over to me.
“I’m so sick of dealing with Amy.
I wish I could just dump her at the doctors so they can take care of her.”
I’m frozen in place as I overhear my Mum talking to my Dad. I run back to my room and I find myself having a panic attack.
I’m laying in bed, “asleep”, when I hear my Dad walk up beside my bed. I peek out of my eye slightly, and see the light of my phone screen illuminate the room.
My Dad is standing there, looking at my notifications.
I start to wake up, and he quickly covers himself, saying he was just “seeing if it needed charging for tomorrow”.
These happened a long time ago, and to this day they continue to prove to me that they can’t be trusted and that they lie to me all the time.
They tell me I can trust them. They tell me that they will always support me. They tell me that they’ll always have my side. They have even told me that they will give me privacy.
But actions speak louder than words.
The Cat Knew That They Had Come to Put Him to Sleep! So Be It, For the Mistress Was Gone!
When I was in my “living in the van” stage of life… also known as the “lost in the wilderness” period, we encountered quite an array of interesting and curious people. Ah. The world is populated with them. But most people never encounter them as they lie on the outer fringes of society.
Typically, my wife (at that time) and myself would land in a city and find ourselves trying to obtain some bearings on our life. This would typically be in a large parking lot associated with a strip mall. These strip malls are ugly affairs. Just brick establishments and a big parking lot. And we would make the best of it, by using that as our “base camp” and then walking about to get our bearings.
One day, doing this, we noticed that we were being followed. An older man. Maybe in his 50’s or so. He would be following us. If we went down a street, he would follow us. If we went into a store, there he was, peering at us. If we went into a restaurant, he would be there in a corner table. And it was really creepy.
We tried to “shake him off”. But he was on us like a “horse fly” on a deer butt. We just couldn’t get rid of him.
We went up town… he followed us.
We went down town… he followed us.
Finally, after about three hours (!) of this, we saw a laundry-mat. We went inside and then ran out the back and locked the door behind us. There, in the ally, we peered into the empty laundry-mat (through a small square window), and there we was alone, and pretending to looking around. We guessed he realized that “we knew”.
Sheech!
Some people appear to be harmless, but they have severe and potentially dangerous mental and behavioral illnesses. Get away from them. For the love of God.
Two stories, one belongs to my parents and the other one is mine.
My parents left the church we attended in what is now called South Central L.A. after the minister said, from the pulpit, that while the black babies were welcome to come to Sunday school, their parents would not be invited to join the church. This was in the early 1960’s, the neighborhood was ´changing ´ (and eventually became the scene of the flashpoint for the 1992 Rodney King riot/rebellion, which took place a block away from that church).
To my parents’ credit, even though my mom had grown up in that church and they had strong social ties there, we started visiting other churches the next month. They settled on a church in a different Protestant denomination because it had a robust youth group. While the pastor was white and the congregation was mainly white, they were actively reaching out to the neighborhood (which was primarily black), including several weekly ‘gym nights’ for neighborhood youth. My parents felt this was a good fit for us.
I remember a few odd things… a sermon that called out Ronald Reagan as the Antichrist because his first, middle and last names all had 6 letters (666, the mark of the beast). The pastor’s wife didn’t come to church every Sunday and when she did, she wore dark glasses and kept to herself.
But for me the final straw came when the high school youth group had a special invite to the pastor’s home. We sat around in his living room, where he had a fire burning in the fireplace. He chatted with us a bit, and then brought in a tape player and without any introduction, began playing a tape for us. Within a few minutes it became clear that it was a tape of a session where he was counseling a church member. As it proceeded, he started calling on demons (who had funny squeaky voices on the tape) and casting them into the pits of hell.
Exorcism was not something that had ever been mentioned before. There was no context for this at all for those of us listening. We were all just frozen in shock.
When that tape finished, he threw it into the fire and loaded up another. It only got worse. One of several exorcism tapes he played that night was the mom of two of the boys in the room.
I don’t think any of us spoke as we got in the church bus to go back. It was completely out of context to all of us.
I was still in high school, and continued going on Sundays with my family until I graduated. But from then on I felt like I was there as an outside observer rather than a member (even though I was still officially a member). I stopped going to youth group activities, though. And the week I turned 18 I stopped going altogether.
Much later, after that pastor’s contract was terminated, my mom mentioned that he had been abusing his wife all along, and that shortly before his contract was pulled, several church ladies had spirited her away to a domestic violence shelter.
(And to any who may object to references of race, please understand that in the 1960’s, race was the context for almost everything. I’m glad, at least, that my parents were firmly on the right side in terms of civil rights).
She’d volunteered to be the treasurer for a local non-profit. She had a board meeting coming up.
“I need your help. Do you know what Excel is?”
Not good.
She’s smart. But not a big numbers person. And has never worked with financial figures. She really shouldn’t have volunteered for this position. But her heart was in the right place.
“Yes 🙂 I spend a lot of time in Excel. Whatsup?” (I work in Finance.)
She says, “I have 3 days before this board meeting. I can’t get any of these numbers to work. I stink at math. I’ll pay you. Pleeeease. Please.”
I met up with her.
It was ugly. The numbers were all over the place, they were wrong, the formulas were wack. The “books” she’d inherited from the prior person were a total mess.
I spent several hours cleaning up this file. The list of problems was endless. I worked as fast as I could. She’d be useless without accurate information.
Then I began explaining the basics to her. And organized the data in an easy-to-read way.
She had no idea what she was getting into. A board meeting as her first dip into finance? Yikes. My #1 goal was just to get her through it without embarrassing herself.
I gave her very easy numbers to cite.
“So when they ask you about this. Say ‘our cash position is good, as of last month it was xyz. It is up X percent from the month prior, and X percent year over year.”
You’ll sound semi-competent. Got it?”
She said, “Got it – but could you say that again though?”
I went through it again.
I gave her all the breakdowns. If they ask you this, say that; if they ask this, say that. I had her fully trained. As best as one can on this on short notice.
Wednesday night. I got a call.
“How did it go?”
I was sure she’d be crying.
She said, “It went amazing! They loved the data. Thank you so much, Sean. I owe you.”
I said, “No. You owe me nothing, dear. I was happy to help.”
Chinese defense systems from 4500 years ago
Believed to serve dual purposes, these ancient tunnels must have been used both as a transportation network and a means of defence and offence. Featuring arched ceilings reminiscent of Longshan period cave dwellings, the tunnels, measuring 3-6 ft in height and approximately 4 ft in width, spread out in a radial pattern, connecting to the centre of the subterranean city.
Archaeologists have unearthed a sophisticated triple-defence system and an intricate network of tunnels at the ancient Houchengzui Stone City in Inner Mongolia, China. This archaeological marvel, believed to be around 4,300 to 4,500 years old.
Spread across half a square mile, it stands as the largest and most heavily fortified archaeological site in Inner Mongolia from the early Longshan period (3000 to 1900 BC).
The ongoing excavation, which was initiated in 2005, has revealed the complex triple-defence system comprising the main city wall, terraces, gatehouse walls, moats, and trenches. The recent undertaking by the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), has brought to light a new layer of defence – an elaborate tunnel system beneath the city.
Believed to serve dual purposes, these ancient tunnels must have been used both as a transportation network and a means of defence and offence. Featuring arched ceilings reminiscent of Longshan period cave dwellings, the tunnels, measuring 3-6 ft in height and approximately 4 ft in width, spread out in a radial pattern, connecting to the centre of the subterranean city.
Several tunnels pass under the fortified city walls, extending beyond its boundaries. Sun Jinsong,
Director of the Cultural Relics and Archaeology Academy of Inner Mongolia, explained that some passages open from outside the city, and pass through various structures like the outer Wengcheng city wall, trenches, and the Wengcheng square.
The strategic design of Houchengzui Stone City, with its elaborate defence systems and concealed tunnels, elaborates its cultural significance in military defence, reflecting its role as a strategic location.
The stone city comprises an inner and outer city fortified with three concentric walls, guarded gates, and trenches. The recent excavations, conducted from 2019 to 2023, focused on the Wangcheng gate, high-level buildings in the inner city, and the tomb area.
Researchers have categorised the city’s architecture into simple and complex stone masonry and earthen walls. Simple stone city walls, positioned along ridges, are constructed with layers of stones and filled with loess or earth. Over the five-year excavation, the team uncovered various elements, including city walls, gates, horse faces, trenches, platform foundations, underground passages, house sites, and tombs.
Among the notable discoveries are the main city gate (CM1), urn city gate (CM2), and outer urn city gate (CM3). Descriptions of the main city gate highlight its rectangular plan, measuring about 15 m in length from north to south and 9 to 11 m in width from east to west, with intricate features, such as doorways, gate walls, earth platforms, and other architectural elements.
The ongoing exploration of Houchengzui Stone City continues to provide valuable insights into ancient civilization, military strategy, and architectural prowess during the Longshan period.
Japan beauty standards
Baked Eggs on Toast (Jaja na Grzankach – Polish)
Ingredients
6 slices white bread
Butter
3 tablespoons freshly-grated Parmesan cheese
1 tablespoon chopped fresh chives
6 eggs
Salt and freshly-ground pepper, to taste
Instructions
Toast the bread and butter it on both sides. Place on a baking sheet and, using the tips of your fingers, make a small depression in each piece of toast. Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese and chives. Carefully drop an egg onto each piece of toast and season with salt and pepper.
Bake in a preheated 400 degrees F oven for 5 to 10 minutes, until the eggs reach the desired degree of doneness.
You can have as many accounts as you want. Pay only gets deposited in one, though.
Your finances are your business until you get in trouble, then it’s the Army’s business.
The Army has learned that by keeping Soldiers home life stable there won’t be any distractions when deployed. If you do have a problem, take it to your chain of command. There are people who’ll help with food, housing, money, medical, transportation, childcare, etc. Just know the Army will do what’s best for the Army but they’ll try not to be invasive or cause a hardship. If you refuse to comply, you can be chaptered out. Knew a single mom who refused to do her family care plan and the separated her. Just remember, your commander has final say on what happens.
A PFC in my old squad was assaulted by his wife. She tore a contact and scratched his eye. The CO moved him into the barracks indef. The wife lost BAH, BAS, and medical. She was only allowed on post with permission from the BN CO. He was in the barracks for three weeks until they could get his kids. The unit helped get him settled offpost and figure out logistics.
If you think you’re being scammed, been scammed, or even getting a questioning message about a service member or a demand for money contact your squad leader, Platoon Sergeant, 1SG, finance NCO or commanding officer. They know lots of ways to help and get you unstuck.
Cooking a steak is no small deal. Steaks are pricey and personal, everyone wants there’s done the way they want it to be done, no exceptions. This is especially true when it comes to seasoning.
The method I’m going to share with you is the way I like steaks to be done, it’s not carved in stone behind a fancy French restaurant or anything. If you like what you read, give it a whirl. If not, try someone else’s method, or invent your own.
Ribeye’s are my steak. I can ramble off a number of others that I enjoy but most of the time I’m eating a tender, juicy, meaty ribeye. Its richness can stand up to a wide range of seasoning, from a basic salt and pepper, to a spicy Southwestern, Cajun blackening spice or whatever’s your poison. My basic steak seasoning is salt, pepper, garlic and onion powders, oregano and smoked paprika. That combo is the tits on a nicely seared ribeye. What you want to know though is how to get it to the steak, right? Well, here we go.
First, season your ribeye well on both sides with coarse salt and let it sit on the counter for about 20 minutes. Known as dry brining, the salt will pull moisture to the surface of the steak, dissolve in that moisture and the steak will drink it back up, seasoning the meat. Get a heavy skillet rip roaring hot, add a touch of oil and then pat the steak dry with paper towels. Lower the steak into the hot pan and sear the hell out of it, until it is crispy golden brown. Oh, make sure you have your pre-mixed seasoning blend handy, because it’s about to come into play.
Flip the steak and sprinkle the seasoning onto the seared side so it blooms in the hot bubbling oil on top of the steak. Then cook it to your desired doneness. The exception to this would be a blackened steak, where you want the seasoning to make contact with the hot pan, so the seasonings become seared with the steak. My method prevents the spices from burning and becoming bitter from contact with the hot pan, which will happen with onion, garlic and paprika.
I’m not expecting a James Beard Award or anything, but I’ve never eaten a bad steak prepared using my seasoning method. Give it a shot and see how it works out for you.
I worked for a small family owned glaziers. I was 18, and while my title was “administrator” I was more of a general dogsbody, which wasn’t a big deal, I liked the other staff and there was nothing to hate about the job itself.
My boss was another kettle of fish. Firstly, he smoked in his “office” which was a small almost hallway that was directly behind the receptionist area and he stunk out the whole building (it was illegal at the time, he didn’t care). He was also pretty abusive to everybody and even forced 2 apprentices to fight over £20 or be fired, then kept the £20. He was a fucking animal.
So, on Fridays I always finished at 3, everybody did. I arrived a few minutes late as the bus was delayed, and my punishment for this was to clean the reception area (we had a lot of mirrors and glass), then his “office”. Then I had to clean the boys kitchen (we had no cleaner, the office staff didn’t go near the kitchen). Needless to say it was rank and took me right up until 2:30, I then having done none of my actual work dealt with the letters which I had to take up to the post box. I also didn’t get a break.
3pm rolls round and I’m walking out the door having clocked out, letters in hand when the phone rings, the receptionist gets my attention while on the phone, hangs up and said “boss said you’re going f**king nowhere til you get up the stairs and clean the toilet”.
My reply “nope” I then walked out, got on the bus and left. I never went near them again.
Without MAJOR service; probably. I have purchased many vehicle that had sat long term, think decades. There are a few steps to getting them running.
Pull all the spark plugs and put a copious amount of oil in the cylinders. I like Marvel Mystery oil mixed with Automatic Transmission Fluid. Leave that concoction at a minimum of over night to soak and penetrate all the surfaces of the piston and rings.
Fuel / Gas would probably be an issue as it has probably varnished up the tank, fuel pump and fuel lines. The carburetor or fuel injectors may have survived without needing repair. Possible but not likely. So a full cleaning of the fuel system would be necessary. Replace the fuel filter and add fresh gas.
You will definitely need a new battery.
At day two or three you can attempt to turn the engine over by hand, GENTLY without the spark plugs installed. The goal is to slowly move and introduce the oil you put in the cylinders onto the surfaces of the cylinder wall. Once the oil is no longer in the cylinders I would change the original oil and filter.
Reinstall the spark plugs, connect the new battery and using the key turn over the engine. By not priming the intake the engine should turn over for several seconds lubricating the engine with fresh oil before it starts.
At this point you could prime the intake, cross your fingers and start the vehicle.
You will probably experience engine and running gear seal leaks. The seals used to hold lubricants and fluids will tend to dry out when a vehicle has sat for a long period.
All that being said; I spent 25 years buying one car. A 1959 Cadillac coupe. I personally knew that it had sat for over 10 years when I finalized the purchase. I had it transported to my shop where I performed the above procedures. I did a tune-up, added a new fuel pump and battery and drove the Caddy up and down the road.
“Gentlemen, I Suggest You Beam Me Aboard.” Captain Kirk
It actually happened to me. A sheriff’s deputy delivered my 16-year-old daughter to my door one night, saying that she’d been arrested for skinny-dipping in the YMCA with 48 of her friends.
That’s right. 49 skinny-dipping teenagers. They’d been let in the building after hours by one of the lifeguards.
Police charged them with trespassing because, after all, skinny-dipping in a closed building is not a crime.
My reaction? Well, I think I tried not to giggle and told my daughter to go to bed. I was a little put out that I had to rearrange my schedule to go to court with her, but other than that, no, I wasn’t upset. I thought it was funny.
Apparently the judge agreed. When we showed up in court, 49 kids and their parents in suits and dresses trying to look contrite, and one petite, grey-haired judge trying to look stern. She wasn’t completely successful — she kept excusing herself to her chambers so as not to burst out laughing. She told them they had to write a note of apology to the manager of the YMCA.
About a week later I ran into the judge downtown and we talked about the case. “Kids today have it too easy,” she said. “When I was a teenager my gang and I had to climb fences to go skinny-dipping.”
EDIT: Several people have commented that the kids weren’t trespassing because they had been let in by a lifeguard. I checked the Colorado statute for third-degree trespass which states that it is not trespassing if they are on the property with the permission of the property owner. The lifeguard was one of the kids and told the cops she’d let everyone in, but a building custodian said that she had no authority to do so. The cops called the manager of the YMCA, and he not only told the police to arrest the kids but also fired Mary the lifeguard on the spot.
An interesting corollary to this that I knew both cops. In fact they approached me separately to apologize for arresting my daughter, but the custodian and especially the YMCA manager gave them no discretion. But even when they were dropping off my daughter at my door, they said I shouldn’t worry about any legal repercussions because they couldn’t imagine any judge in Boulder giving the kids more than a stern lecture and maybe community service.
Left to Fend Alone: Abandoned by Family After 18 Years, This Cat Finds Itself in a Shelter.
My students always seem shocked when I tell them this:
Like most students in America, my students get periodic standardized tests throughout the year. Standardized tests are created by national groups and administered to students all over the country. That’s the “standard” part of it. The teacher just proctors the test. We don’t see them ahead of time, and have no input as to what’s on the test. After the first test, I always ask them:
“How many of you were just tested?”
They all say that they were.
Then I hit them with the truth:
“You all took the test, but I was the one being tested. These tests are just as much about tracking my effectiveness as a teacher as they are about tracking your effectiveness as a learner. I hope you all did well, because it makes me look good.”
Standardized testing is just as much about testing teachers as it is students.
a friend owned a landscaping company and after a number of problems with his HOA he got mad when they told him the verity of grass in his lawn was the wrong type.
he did lawns for a living and knew he had seeded his lawn with the right type of grass and the HOA board knew nothing about grass and he was the only person with the right type of grass listed in the HOA rules. he got mad and one dark and foggy night drove to each HOA board members homes and sprayed herbicide across their lawns. they went nuts and had to hire a landscaper to fix their yards.
They told the landscaper what type of grass they needed to plant by the HOA RULES and he did. Only to find there lawns did not match the rest of the HOA and they had no idea why.
the HOA board looked like fools when they found out they were wrong.
I had bought a Chrysler Concorde – and it was a superb road car, roomy, huge trunk, good performance and an excellent ride.
At 30K miles the water pump started leaking. Went to the dealer, they replaced it on warranty. They said it took 6 hours labor as the entire front of the car had to come off, as well as the front of the engine – the pump was being driven by the rubber timing belt. All good. At 60K miles, it happened again. Took it in and the dealer repaired it but marked it down as a fuel line repair that was a recall item (we already had that repair done) – so again not out any money. Great dealer! At 90K it happen a third time. I chose to just refill the reservoir as it lowered. My wife had the car out one day when the engine just quit, at 60 MPH. She was able to coast into an abandoned gas station. Seems the timing belt had slid off the pump cog having got too wet. This time I was out the $600 labor, plus pump, to replace it. Thankfully the engine was designed such the valves didn’t impact the pistons. The issue was a cheap o-ring that failed each time.
Discussions I had with Chrysler corporate about this resulted in “your problem, go away”. So I have, never bought another Chrysler product and never will.
As the car reached 120K miles, it was in a violent hailstorm. We replaced the broken windows, but did nothing else. Rather than repair the inevitable and impending leak a 4th time, I donated the car. to charity.
This surely wasn’t the bolt-on water pumps I used to be able to swap out in an afternoon on my driveway! Drain the coolant, Pop the hoses, remove the v-belt, and 3 bolts. Reverse the process to install the new pump.
My dad used to carry wads of bank notes in the back pocket of his trousers. Proper old-school. I told him loads of times everyone recommends you don’t do that as it’s easy for pickpockets to steal. His response was always the same: “yeah? Well I’d like to see someone try and take it…”
While I was studying in Madrid, the whole family came out to visit. I said to my dad, apparently the pickpocketing is pretty bad round here (apologies to any madrileños who may disagree/feel offended by that comment). Anyway might be a good idea not to have all your cash in your back pocket. Usual reaction.
We were all getting on a bus in the city centre when some dude had a go at pinching Dad’s money. Before he had a chance to take it, he got an elbow in the guts and a back-hander across the face. He stumbled backwards into some railings, we all got on and the bus drove off.
So that’s when I stopped lecturing my dad about how/where he should carry his money.
While it’s tempting to cry ‘fake’, there are plenty of examples of capybaras chilling next to caiman. There’s even a video here.
I’m not a capybara expert, but I don’t think they would still exist if they simply had no survival instinct, especially with adept predators like jaguars and anacondas around.
And trust me, they would not be sitting calmly next to a jaguar.
If I had to guess, I would suggest capybaras are often so chilled around caiman because:
The cold-blooded reptilians are still sluggish and warming themselves up.
The caiman in these examples are simply too small to overpower a capybara. The largest caiman can reach over 4 metres in length and weigh a tonne — I don’t think capybaras would be quite so comfortable around crocodilians of that size.
Caiman are far less dangerous out of the water and (I suppose) not in ‘hunting mode’. Many crocodilians also eat surprisingly rarely.
Larger caiman do prey on capybaras, so it’s a case of context. The capybaras would rather save their energy for a real life-or-death scenario. Smaller caiman would rather save their energy for some fish.
The guy who wrote bit on the answer sheet and copied in plain sight .
In my school during exams 2 students will be seated in each bench. The student next to us will be in different grade to avoid copying.
When I was in tenth grade(2004) , in the bench before me there was a ninth grade guy.
Usually students copy in exams using bits. For those who are not familiar with the term bit is a small paper in which students write answers and take it into exam hall hiding it somewhere.
The risk here is the examiner catching you in the act.
Our school answer sheet looks like this
Everyone is given 4 sheets at the beginning and once they need more papers they put a tick in the tracking sheet and take additional sheets. At the end the sheets are tied together and handed over. So this tracking sheet will contain how many sheets a student used but no one tallies it at the end of exam.
This guy decided to use this loophole.
One day I finished my exam early and was looking out the window. His seat is a window seat and mine is aisle but he sits one bench before me.
He suddenly crumpled one of the answer sheet and threw it outside the window and he repeated it for 2 other sheets. I got curious but that day I was not able to find the answer and it kept me sleepless.
Next day I again watched him and he did the same thing but this time I caught him after the exam and asked him why he did that.
This is what the guy did.
Instead of carrying a bit paper he wrote the answers in normal handwriting using the actual exam sheet and brought it to exam hall. Even if the teacher sees it would just look like an exam sheet used by him. Everyday he used to take additional papers to write bit for next day exam. The question paper will not be collected so he hid it under the question paper everyday and took it home and both these sheets are exactly same size.
I asked him why do you even bother writing the answers again instead of just adding the bit paper in exam sheet since it is already written on an exam sheet.
His answer made me go wow. Everyday different teachers come and even if the same teacher comes they would sign on the top with the date , since the date and sign would differ he rewrote the answer everyday and threw the bit paper out of the window and mostly he did this for the bigger answers only .
Still not convinced, I asked him what if someone sees the paper he threw down. He took me to the window and showed what’s beneath the window. It was our canteens roof which is ideally a small shed with asbestos roof and already had lots of garbage. The thing won’t even fly in the air even if there was a strong wind.
My next doubt was how would he know what questions would come and even if he did won’t he require lots of sheets to write the answers. It was actually internal test and not board exam so the teachers would kind of let the weak students know 80% of questions in the evening special coaching class. He got that inside info and wrote just the answers he felt that were difficult. Like study 50% and copy 50%.
I mean copying in exams is one thing but I ve never seen a heist level planning like he did .
Cigarette smoking on airplanes and in restaurants…albeit in a smoking section. Goes without saying you could smoke in bars too.
Soda bottles had metal tops that you needed to use a bottle opener to open.
Beer and soda cans had pop tops:
See the one on the left? That’s the one. You know what they would do after pulling off the tab? They’d throw it on the ground. Then, you’d ride your bike over it and get a flat or it would pierce your foot and you’d have to go get a tetanus shot from the doctor. It’s even immortalized in Jimmy Buffet’s song “Margaritaville”: “Stepped on a pop top/Blew out my flip flop”.
Kids were sent out to play with no supervision at all. We were only instructed to come home when the street lights turned on. We did incredibly intelligent things like bully weaker kids, smash glass bottles on the ground, and throw rocks at each others’ heads.
All the good cartoons were on Saturday morning only.
If you liked a movie, you had to pay to go see it in the theater only. You couldn’t get it on home video at all. You pretty much had to wait a few years before they showed it on TV.
There were only 3 channels: ABC, CBS, and NBC. If you lived in the big city you might have a few extra UHF local channels. They mostly played reruns of Bonanza, I Love Lucy, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Brady Bunch, Star Trek, and I Dream Of Jeannie.
If you got out of line in school you’d get your ass spanked by the gym coach who wielded something that looked like a ping pong paddle with holes in it for speed.
The speed limit on highways and interstates was 55 miles per hour (88.5 kph) and it took forever to get to grandma’s house…with no phones, no personal stereos, just sitting there. Parents would give young kids a tiny bit of alcohol mixed in with their juice so they would sleep.
The guy they would call the “fat kid” would only be a little husky by today’s standards.
Divorce was still kind of a taboo, in that “people would talk” about those who were divorced but it was pretty much commonplace by the end of the 70s and no big deal.
The Rock and Roll guys, the Disco guys, and the Country Music guys all hated each other. The Rock and Roll guys smoked dope, the Disco guys did coke and the Country Music guys drank Jack Daniels. The Disco guys got all the girls and the Rock and Roll guys got beat up by the Country Music guys.
Houston, Texas actually had kind of a good football team.
EDIT:
Did you guys ever have this? We didn’t have milk delivery. I think they were phasing it out by the time I was a kid in the 70s…not sure. But we DID have Charles Chips Delivery.
Yep they’d deliver a huge tin (huge to me as I was like 7 years old) of POTATO CHIPS to your front door in a Charles Chips delivery truck. You’d leave out the empty tin and they’d replace it with a new one.
Edit 2:
Ah, TV!
So…the top dial is VHF. This had channels 2–13. These were ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS if you had it. The bottom dial is UHF, it had channels 14–82 (I think?). In order to get a UHF channel you had to turn the top dial to “U” and then you turned the bottom dial to whatever UHF channel had “The Munsters” reruns on it.
Some people were lucky enough to have a remote control (which was rather rare) which made a loud, metallic clicking sound…so it was called the “clicker”. Older people even today call the remote control “the clicker”.
Others of us had the old fashioned remote control called “Hey kid, turn it to channel 2 or I’ll thump yer skull for ya!”
Some TVs had rabbit ears on them. You’d have to send a person over to the TV to adjust them or your signal wouldn’t be very good. Inevitably the person would form some kind of “radar circuit” with the TV and you’d make them stand there for the last play of the super bowl so you could see it.
Other smarter folks did this:
Yep, they wrapped foil around the antennae to boost its receiving power.
Others forcibly shoved a thick, folded piece of paper between the dial and the TV.
Other more lucky folks had one of these:
A wire ran from this roof antenna down to the back of your TV where you had to screw it to the back.
Going anonymous as this is about my students, however real names are not used.
I’m a maths teach at a local secondary school in an area where most students live off benefits. I had one girl, Daisy, who was highly intelligent, we did an iq test and her score was in the 140s.
One day I asked her if she was going to university, no was her answer, I was puzzled, she excelled in class and had a keen interest in maths and science. She was proud too, wearing her maths and science award badges everyday.
I asked her why, here was her response.
‘I can’t afford it’
Me:’you can get scholarships and grants’
‘It’s not that, trust me I’ve checked, it’s the living costs.’
That’s when I realised, this girl was 12 and knew she couldn’t progress further than college, not due to lack of talent or enthusiasm, due to money. I sat down with her, she cried all of one lunch in year 11, I cried to, at her potential wasted beyond belief, maybe the most talented student I’ve ever taught, not able to advance.
I started a fund for all the children like her, unable to attend university due to money, and it worked. I raised enough to put her though and support her family, I’ve put other though uni too.
I learnt that money is a problem and a worry for 12 year old girls but I also learnt talent can’t be wasted, children like her need a way to succeed.
I hope I gave that to her, she now works as a medical researcher and was given the life she never thought she’d have.
One morning she calls me at 4 AM. I picked up the phone half asleep. I thought it to be some kind of emergency.
Me: Hello? Is everything Okay babe?
She: Yeah, but….
(Now buts can be dangerous at 4 AM)
Me: Are you hungry baby? (Only emergency I can think of)
She: I have to talk to you about something very important.
Me: You sure it can’t wait?
She: If it could, I wouldn’t be here.
Me: Okay, shoot me.
She: I want you to stop talking to Seeta, Geeta, Meeta, Papeeta. I don’t like them.
Me (perplexed): Is that what you wanted to say? But they’re my friends. They’ve been there even before you were.
She (angrily): Then stay with them, not me.
Me: Okay Baby, anything for you. I won’t talk to them.
She: You’re so cute. Love you baby, goodnight kiss on your lips, muuaaahh.
2 Weeks Later
In a food outlet
Me (in a sarcastic way): Baby, what’s about your best friend, Rahul? How’s he?
She (stands up in anger):You don’t trust me, do you? He’s my best friend and always been with me. He understands me like no one else can. So, stop being the detective’s ass and get a life dude. He never asked about you, but you can’t stay put. I wonder at times, if I’d have dated Rahul, things would’ve been better.
Me (trying to say something meaningful): But……..
She (cuts me in between): Learn to trust the person you’re in relationship with. It’s necessary to give space at times. But, YOU WON’T UNDERSTAND.
Ironical.
So, answering the question, I can’t tolerate double standards in a relationship.
I’ve read all the answers and most of the responses. I’ve been in food service for 30 years. I currently own a 34-seat brunch restaurant. 200 covers during a 6-hour weekend service is not uncommon for us. I have a basic idea of what I am talking about. So, why might a restaurant call items out that are on the menu, or they do have in stock.
1. Equipment Failure – this happens typically on a Saturday or Sunday morning, two hours into service with a full restaurant, 45-minute wait for a 2-top and 80 covers do in for reservations.
2. Staffing – Johnny decides to catch the fat part of his left hand just below his thumb with the tip of his knife laying it open. You’d think someone was shot in the kitchen. When does this happen? Read #1. You are now down a person – the kitchen has to be balanced, menu items that require all three of us to put out or rely heavily on one station are called out – some say 86’d
3. Ingredient Shortage – someone dropped all the hard-boiled eggs or an entire tray of croissant, 4# of sliced turkey gets knocked onto the floor. An item did not show up in the morning delivery. An ingredient spoils too fast (avocados). A refrigerator door was left cracked open all night. When does this happen? See #1
4. Inventory – we only cook so much brisket a week (based on sales) – some weeks we get pounded with brisket tacos. With shared ingredients (brisket) we may call a less popular item out to keep a more popular item available longer.
5. Super busy and loose count of our prep – we may call an item out until we can get an all-day count of the orders hanging and a count of remaining prep.
Now some of the comments I’ve read from other answers mainly dealing with running out of food. Your local sports bar or chain restaurant is not going to run out of chicken wings, why? They have 200# in the freezer and the dish only requires 10 minutes from frozen in a deep fryer. They are also open 12 to 14 hours a day 7 days a week. I’m not buying any more steaks than I’ll need for the week, I buy them fresh. These guys have 100# of frozen steaks and never run out.
The brisket we serve takes 10 hours to prep and cook the pork belly takes 4 hours to prep and cook. Menu items are prepped and cooked based off previous sales numbers. If I historically sell 11 portions of brisket in a day I’m not prepping 35 portions I’m prepping 15.
We had a cold windy morning and sold all our sausage gravy in the first two hours of being open. We did not prep any less than normal and our sales numbers were not higher than normal. That morning everyone wanted sausage gravy. There was no #10 can of sausage gravy in the back like your local diner. This menu item is made from scratch there were no ingredients and no people to make more. These are the issues a from scratch restaurant deals with.
We met at the estate agent’s office, all set – but as we talked the deal over with him, it became more and more obvious that he was having second thoughts. It was a bit of a stretch for one income, even though it was a good income.
In the end, we (well, the estate agent) plain asked him. And since he hadn’t yet signed the paper, he could, with visible relief, back out of the deal.
Looking at the other bids, we decided to sell to the third highest bidder. The home had huge potential, which we hadn’t been able to realise for various reasons, and the third bidder was a young couple – and he was a carpenter. He would know how to do stuff, he would know his limitations, he would know people who could do whatever he wanted done at a good price.
They were ecstatic, especially the girl, who had fallen in love with the place to the extent that she had been crying herself to sleep when they lost the bidding.
And… it felt very nice, because for the house we were moving to, we hadn’t been the highest bidders, either; it was just that the previous owners liked us a lot better than the highest bidder. (And they had owned the house since the 1950s and were making an insanely good deal anyway; they paid off their mortgage some 70 times over with what we paid.) We paid it forward immediately.
Initially it’s beauty that attracts you, eventually it’s their mindset you need to handle. Choose wisely.
Sexual attraction will fade over time and hopefully would be replaced by genuine love, care and concern about your partner’s well-being.
No matter how much you love them and they love you, eventually comes money if you want to be together forever. Balance career and love.
Be available all the time and you’ll be their ex soon because it’s our human nature, things which are easily available, we start taking it for granted unintentionally.
Choose them faster, get dump faster because every thing has process and you skipped it.
There is no tried and tested strategy to prevent cheating and infidelity. Trust is the only option.
Most people are never grateful for the little things that their partners do for them, until they stop it.
Keep your expectations low from the partner if you want to be truly happy.
Sad Shelter Cat No Longer Believed Anyone Would Pay Attention To Him
We’d been friends for about 6 years. There were already cracks starting to form before the bigger fracture. She begged me to goat yoga with her – basically yoga in a field with goats walking on you. Not my idea of fun but I wanted to be a good friend so a bought a ticket. When I told her she laughed and said she hadn’t even got a ticket! Now I was typically let’s say generous with this friend. I often picked up the tab or paid the lions share as I was financially in a better place. But it had gone from me offering to her expecting in recent months. I suspected she held off buying a ticket to get me to add hers to my bill. I shook off the feeling at the time.
When the time of the goat yoga approached I was going through some issues and couldn’t make it (other people were joining us so she wasn’t left solo). I let the friend know about a week prior. With no response. A day or so before the event I decided to donate the ticket back to the provider as they were an animal sanctuary charity. My friend was upset as she was hoping to have my ticket. She’d already sold her ticket to another friend and was expecting to just take mine. When I asked why wouldn’t I have just sold mine to the friend, she said she could pay me back later and needed the money. Yeah right. The fog lifted at that moment. I stopped paying her way and she stopped inviting me out. I realised I was little more than a wallet to her.
My husband is a woodworker. His family was always asking for free labor, and materials, and finished products including cabinetry and furniture. His sister had moved into a new house and wanted him to refinish her basement for her. It was fall and the sister invited family over for a luncheon. She then laid into my husband to bring his tools and supplies so he could “do a quick job”. We get there, and the brother in laws are watching football. The sisters are gossiping in the kitchen. No one offers to lift a finger. So I start helping my husband with the job. Oh, yeah, by the way, I’m like 6 months pregnant at the time. No one offers to lift a finger to help me either. Through the vents, we can hear them talking in the kitchen, talking about what a crappy job I’m doing taking care of my pregnant self, and what a crappy husband their brother is, and what horrible parents we’re going to make. This isn’t new. we know the kind of people they are and always have been. We finish the job, load up the tools, then before lunch is served we leave, with hubby explaining he needs to get me home so I can take a nap. We stopped and had a nice meal on the way home.
A long time ago I was leaving Pace, a membership warehouse, which was later sold to Sam’s Club, I believe. It was actually a warehouse, so there was a long ramp to get up to the level of the store.
As I was leaving, with a good view since it was higher and quite a distance, I see the person parked next to me move their cart to right behind my truck. The timing was perfect as I got to the cart as the person was getting into their car and I moved the cart behind his vehicle, then got in my truck and left. I got to see him start to back out, realize that the cart was there and get out as I drove away. I am not sure if he figured out how it got there.
Another time at CostCo, again an actual warehouse location and was really crowded all the time, the parking lot was a bit strange and there were three parking spaces near a fence. There was only one way to get out as it was angled and ended at the fence. I had backed into the first space, so it was easy to exit, except for an idiot. They wanted the space and wouldn’t move to let me leave. I might have been able to back up behind the other two spaces, but instead I backed into the space and turned the engine off and just looked at them. It took a bit of time, but eventually they realized that if they wanted the space, then they would have to back up so that I had space to leave, which they did and I left.
My SIL (husband’s sister) is pretty high maintenance. Perfect hair, perfect clothes, perfect make-up…you know the type. Name-brand everything. Lucky for her, she found the Ken to her Barbie. Her husband is just as much of a perfectionist. He has to have perfect hair and perfect clothes. He’s neurotic about keeping things clean and orderly.
I always said that if we ever had kids, theirs would be standing to the side in name-brand clothes while mine and my husbands would be having a riot playing in mud puddles in play clothes.
My son was born first and we always dressed him in practical, functional clothes. The three-pack of onsies for $10 at Walmart? Yes, please! Babies grew fast and we opted for functional and cost-effective clothes. He’d outgrow them in a month or so and we didn’t feel the need to pay a lot of money for clothes he’d just outgrow.
My nephew was born seven months later. From the get-go, it was expensive everything. Everything had to be name-brand and could only be in one of four colours: White, Grey, Navy, or Black. My husband once looked on the website where my SIL got all of her son’s clothes. $20 for one pair of baby socks. $80 for a pair of baby jeans. It was insanity, spending so much on a baby. They quickly learned how much of their money they were burning with my nephew kept having diaper blow-outs. BIL would scrub and scrub to try to save the expensive onesie, but it was often a lost cause without dry-cleaner intervention. When home, they kept him in just a diaper until another blowout soiled their couch. At that point, they kept him in the “cheap” clothes from Carters, but when they were out, this kid was dressed to the nines. At meal times, they stripped him down to a diaper to save his clothes.
But, they didn’t quite learn their lesson. When the little guy started daycare at a year old, they sent him in designer outfit with a back-up. On a few occasions, my nephew burned through his outfit and the back-up and ended up coming home in some other kid’s clothes. Once again, my BIL and SIL had to dress him in “cheap” clothes.
And then they complain that having a kid is so expensive and they can’t understand how we can afford to have a second child when we make so much less than they do. Go figure.
Good grief. I’m sorry so many people have let themselves go, but being “old” isn’t a death sentence. I’m nearing seventy five. I walk three or four miles a day (granted I live in Manhattan and walking is more entertaining here than it is out there in America where you have to drive to the drugstore three miles away); I eat anything I want to, I play too many video games (I found Starfield disappointing, didn’t you?), and I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life with the girl of my dreams for 38 years now (gee, has it been that long, it seems like yesterday).
Don’t be surprised if, when you reach my age, you find you still are the exact same person you were when you were eleven.
Nobody has solved this problem yet. The problem statement is actually quite simple. It’s called the “moving couch problem.” The mathematician Leo Moser posed the following curious mathematical problem in 1966: “what is the shape of the largest area in the plane that can move around a right-angled corner in a two-dimensional corridor of width 1?”
We can start with a 1 by 1 square.
However, this semicircle with radius 1 works better. It has an area π/2
We can continue to make improvements. The mathematician John Hammersley noticed that if the semicircle is cut into two quarter circles, which are separated and the space between them is filled with a rectangular block, we get a larger sofa shape, which could be moved around the corner if only removes a smaller semicircular hole from the rectangular block.
In 1992, Joseph Gerver found a better shape with a slightly larger area of around 2.2195. Gerver could not prove that his solution was optimal. To this day, 50 years after the question was asked, it is still the best solution.
Attempts have been made to find upper limits. Mathematicians have defined a “couch constant”, which is just the answer to this problem! Yoav Kallus and Dan Romik demonstrated an upper limit in June 2017, with a consistent couch limit of 2.37.
Update: a twist.
No, this is literally a twist. A variant of the sofa problem asks for the shape of the largest area that can surround the 90-degree left and right corners in a hallway of unit width. This means that the shape will probably have to be symmetrical. So far the best solution was found by Dan Romik. It looks like a bikini top, with an area of 1.649.
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and about references.
Sources:
Mr. Romik. Differential equations and exact solutions in the moving sofa problem. To appear in Experimental Math.
Y. Kallus, D. Romik. Improved upper bounds in the moving sofa problem. Preprint, 2017.
Moving sofa problem on Wikipedia.
E.W. Weisstein. Moving sofa problem on Wolfram MathWorld.
J.L. Gerver. On moving a sofa around a corner. Geometriae Dedicata 42 (1992), 267-283. doi:10.1007/BF02414066.
P. Gibbs. A computational study of sofas and cars. Preprint, 2014.
I was watching this one-hour stand up by Comedian Daniel Sloss on Netflix, and he told a fascinating thing-
“If you only love yourself at 20%, that means somebody can come along and love you 30%. You’re like, Wow, that’s so much. It’s literally less than half. Whereas if you love yourself 100%, a person that falls in love with you has to go above and beyond the call of duty to make you feel special. That’s something every one of us deserves.”
People understand the value of self-love and know that happiness doesn’t come from a spouse. The concept of being satisfied with life doesn’t mean sharing it with someone, instead, living it to the fullest.
‘Decent’ people you are talking about are more focused on their career, ambitious, family and general fulfilment when it comes to life.
We all have that one friend who hates being single, falls for every person they see and Feel sad and always ask why they are alone. Yes, we all have that kind of friend, but not everyone looks at breakups / being single that way- to some people being single is a way of changing outlook.
As much as I want to wish it is not to true but relationships these days are not as easy as we think- so many cases of unhealthy addiction, violence, toxic relationship, gaslighting emerging and people are not quiet about it anymore.
‘Decent’ people are single because they know it is tempting to blame your partner for break up, but it is also essential to have a self-realisation that you might be wrong. Sense of gratitude and acknowledgement of oneself comes with being single.
People are leaving a mindset behind which suggested that marriage and bearing a child is an essential part of your life; in fact, people are focusing more on financial, emotional and professional growth these days.
People are shifting to a place where they prioritise their happiness, needs etc. over having a partner. Fact we have glorified sex and having a partner so much (thanks to social media) some people are bearing torch which says, ‘I’d rather be sex-less than be unhappy.’
I spent my 10th grade year of high school in a wealthy, white part of California.
My Spanish teacher ended up quitting because she couldn’t handle it anymore.
These were a different type of delinquents. They weren’t dangerous or violent like you might see in a ghetto High School. They were just the purest form of rude and disrespectful. They were spoilt. They didn’t try in school. Their families were rich. Some would probably never have to work.
So after the Spanish teacher quit, they brought in this temp teacher who had no idea what she was getting into.
The kids frequently talked back to her. Would ignore her lectures in the back of the class.
I grew up with a military father so I learned respect early in my life. I didn’t comprehend how people could just mouth off like that. It’d be a death warrant for me.
I’ll never forget one particular exchange.
A 16-year-old girl was not listening. The teacher asked her to stop talking. They started going back and forth arguing.
The girl then shouts, “WHY ARE YOU SUCH A MASSIVE BITCH.”
Which left me and others aghast.
And of course she was sent out of the class. But she was back within a week. I think they just made her sweep the halls for an hour or two after class one day.
Yet another reason American school systems are broken.
My head would have been delivered to the principal in a box by my own parents.
Q: What should I do if my boss says, “If you don’t like the job, you can go”?
A: I worked at a company where they promised a 2 week fully paid vacation if we hit a certain sales number. We exceeded it. Instead of getting that vacation, the company laid off 10% of the work force, told everyone they had to work 10% longer hours to make up for the smaller work force, gave a 0% raise and even held back the $25/person Xmas bonus which, over the years, had been nicknamed the annual turkey money.
A few weeks later, there was a company wide meeting where you could ask upper management anything you wanted. I got up and stated that I interact with many different departments and was seeing an all time low in morale and asked if upper management was also aware of that and, if so, what could be done to improve it.
The CEO got up and said, “Morale is your own D@#$ problem. If you don’t like it leave. After the meeting the VP of my department told me that if I ever asked a question like that again, he would fly to my office and fire me in person.
The next day I gave notice. When asked what it would take as a counter for me to stay, I said double my salary. Anything less wasn’t worth the stress of dealing with upper management azzhats. I got a 50% raise by leaving and within 3 years was making well over double what my salary had been.
I would never advocate quitting a job without having anything else lined up first. I had been working with a head hunter and had an offer in the works when this happened so it made it real easy for me to decide to leave.
A number of years later, I got fed up with management and was watching the company go down the drain. I had started my own business on the side and decided that, since I didn’t like my day job any more, I’d quit. I interviewed for a few positions but decided to make my side job my primary job and really focus on building the business. That’s the best decision I ever made.
So, my advice is, if you don’t like the job, move on. Just don’t do it without a safety net or another job lined up. They say for every $10K in salary it will take 1 month of job searching. So $60K = 6 months and $100K = 10 months. If you don’t have double that amount in your emergency fund, I highly recommend waiting to quit until you have another job lined up. You can at least feel good about knowing you will be gone as soon as you find something else.
P.S. I worked on a farm all through high school and college. I didn’t like hauling pig manure. I didn’t like chopping hay for 36 hours straight. But, there were other parts I did like. You will never find a job where you like 100% of the work. (It’s work, not a hobby!) But, when you don’t like most of what you do, it may be time for a change. I needed that farm job to pay for college so I stuck with it until graduation before moving on. Like is about choices. Take time to think yours through since you will only have yourself to blame if things aren’t working out after you make those choices.
1. If you wear the same colours as the zoo employees, the animals will come right up to you.
2. Use labeled bread clips on your wires so you know which ones you can pull out.
3. To prevent choking while scrubbing your tongue, just look in the mirror at the back of your throat.
4. You can connect two ziplock bags by flipping one inside out to make a larger one.
5. If you dye your hair at home, apply Vaseline along your hair line first.
6. Putting down a couple sheets of toilet paper before taking a dump will stop any of that nasty splash back.
7. Put clothes in the closet with the hangers reversed once a year. As you pull clothes out, reverse the hanger. Every year you can give away any clothes that you never took out.
8. If you are not a ‘up with one alarm’ person, just have a ‘wake up’ alarm and then a ‘get up’ alarm an hour later.
9. Put a key hook just inside the front door and ALWAYS hang your keys on it.
10. To combat lost socks, have a separate mesh bag that you put my socks in as soon as you take them off. Since all you have to do is toss the mesh bag into the wash without opening it.
11. If you’re feeling tired, have a cup of coffee then immediately lay down for a 15–30 minute nap. The caffeine will be kicking in just as you’re waking up.
12. Use the seat heater on the passenger side to keep takeout food warm on the drive home.
13. Squish the toilet paper roll before you hang it up. It will make it roll much more slowly, preventing people (especially young children) from rolling out a large amount.
14. Use a beard trimmer to remove the cat scratch threads from your couch.
15. Put numbers on the bottom of your door for proof photo of delivery. Most of the time, the drivers don’t get your door number in the photo, and this way, they have to.
16. Write the date on your blister packs so you know if you’ve taken your meds for that day or not.
I’m currently in college at a large university in the US. My minor has simple requirements: pass at least 4 of 10 offered classes.
As it turns out, 4 of the 10 classes are taught by the same professor. He teaches 2 in the fall and 2 in the spring. By chance, I took him once. I’ve taken him 3 more times and have earned my minor, getting A’s in every single class. And I guarantee you I couldn’t pass a basic class with any other professor.
This professor gives weekly quizzes and monthly tests in person, but via the computer. We sign into a special software that doesn’t allow us to search the internet, and take the test with him there. Everything was multiple choice. But here’s where it gets interesting:
Many of his questions had more than one answer. So, he set the test so you could check as many answers as you want e.g. we could select both A and B because the answer could be both.
But the test never counted how many answers we selected, and it only made sure you checked the right box, not if you checked a wrong box too. So if the answer was A and B, and I checked A,B, and C, it would count as right.
So what’d I do? I checked A,B,C,D, and E for almost every single question. The software would see that I checked the right answer (because I checked every answer) and mark the question right. Sometimes, to maintain realism, I’d purposefully check only one box for a few questions to get them wrong. My average scores stood between 95–100% the entire semester. And quizzes and tests made up 75% of his grading, the other 25% being just menial homework. These classes boosted my GPA noticeably, and now I have a particularly impressive minor to put on my resume.
Oooh, that’s not good. The flight attendant just burned one of the cockpit crew and let an unauthorized person (your friend) know that there was at least one other armed passenger aboard. That’s a big no-no, but fortunately, the flight attendant gave her note to somebody who wasn’t freaked out or too bothered by it to make a ruckus. All ruckuses involving armed individuals on aircraft are bad.
So, her note says that one of the cockpit crew (the First Officer) is authorized by the feds to fly armed as a Federal Flight Deck Officer (FFDO). They get training at one of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) locations, which I believe is held now at FLETC Artesia (New Mexico). I flew armed a lot as an LEO and the normal procedure was to present my credentials and letter of authorization to the flight deck crew upon boarding the aircraft. The pilots always checked the paperwork very thoroughly, and on occasion one of the pilots would introduce himself and tell me he was an FFDO. Sometimes we’d chat for a moment about their training at FLETC, where I went through training. These were short conversations, as I didn’t want to disrupt their pre-flight routine or concentration. Sometimes the captain would give instructions, like “Don’t take any action on board unless one of the flight attendants asks you first.” That was the rule anyway, but he/she wanted to make sure we got it.
The flight attendants also know that I’m armed and exactly what seat I’m in for two reasons. First, they need to know in case an emergency arises and they ask for assistance. That only happened once in all the flights I took, an extremely unruly passenger who appeared to be progressing from “interfering with a flight crew” and “not following crewmember instructions” to “assault.” (That dude regretted it as there were six of us on board that flight.) The second reason they need to know is that they’re not allowed to serve alcoholic beverages to an armed passenger. For these reasons, we were required to stay in our assigned seats. I was occasionally asked by another passenger to trade seats for whatever reason, but couldn’t and wouldn’t. I got upgraded to business on a couple of flights and had to make sure all the flight attendants knew my new seat and the captain did, too.
We also knew who the air marshals, if any, were and where they were seated. And if any other armed passengers were aboard, we knew that, too, knew what seats they were in, and we usually introduced ourselves before take-off, exchanging identification/credentials. Subtly, so that nobody overhearing us would catch on and maybe cause a ruckus. That’s the other bad part of the Case of the Mislaid Napkin. By giving it to the wrong person (and not knowing that she’d done so), the flight attendant has left the right person in the dark. It’s not as big a deal as it could have been, because the FFDO/armed pilot isn’t coming out of the cockpit with his weapon anyway. I did have flight attendants come over and tell me, “You and the person in 18A are in the same line of work.” I also got a napkin note at least once that I can remember offhand.
Simple, The US initiated and the western blindly mimicking the U.S. media bias narratives casting doubts about China, hurling unfounded accusations on China to hurt China’s reputation, fear mongering by western media.
That is so blatant and disgusting the global south is put off and turn off the west in disgust. Any fool could see it except some brain dead in the west. But is it working fo the U.S. and the west?
I very much doubt so. In fact the more the U.S. does it the worst it looks. Most cultures in the Global South knows that one must have done many good things for a nation to despise it! Hence it falls on death ears mostly. And these days it gets worst and worst for the US.
Yugoslavian Coffee Cake (Povitica)
Ingredients
Cake
1 package active dry yeast
1/4 cup warm water (105 to 115 degrees F)
3/4 cup lukewarm milk (scalded, then cooled)
1/2 cup butter or margarine, softened
3 eggs
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 1/2 to 5 cups all-purpose flour
Walnut Filling
2 1/2 cups finely chopped walnuts
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/3 cup butter or margarine, softened
1 egg
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
Glaze
1 cup confectioners’ sugar
1 tablespoon water
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
Instructions
Cake: Dissolve yeast in warm water in large bowl. Stir in milk, butter, eggs, sugar, salt and 3 cups of the flour. Beat until smooth. Stir in enough remaining flour to make dough easy to handle. Turn dough onto lightly floured surface; knead until smooth and elastic, about 5 minutes. Place in greased bowl; turn greased side up.
Cover; let rise in warm place until double, 1 to 1 1/2 hours. Dough is ready if indentation remains when touched.
Punch dough down; divide into halves. Roll each half into a 15 x 12-inch rectangle on lightly floured surface. Spread half the Walnut Filling over each rectangle. Roll up tightly, beginning at 15-inch side. Pinch edge of dough into each roll to seal well. Stretch rolls to make even.
With sealed edges down, coil into small shapes on lightly greased cookie sheets.
Cover; let rise until double, about 1 hour.
Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
Bake until golden brown, 35 to 45 minutes. Brush with butter if desired; spread with Glaze.
Walnut Filling: Mix all ingredients.
Glaze: Mix confectioners’ sugar, water and vanilla extract until smooth. Stir in additional water if necessary, 1/2 teaspoon at a time.
Africans Reacts to White Globalists Agent Calling Africa Useless
Years ago I had a very abusive Team Leader who would constantly bully me. One day I snapped and got into a shouting match with him so our Manager pulled us to one side and demanded an explanation. I told him everything that happened leading up to the outburst, that I’d had enough, and verbally gave him my resignation. He pleaded for me to reconsider to which my Team Leader said “Nope, he’s already said he’s going. And if you don’t accept his notice then I’ll give you mine”.
After reassurance from the Manager that the bullying would stop, and withdrawing my verbal resignation, my Team Leader handed him his written notice and said that he still had one last opportunity to get rid of me or he was going. The Manager accepted his notice and said he had four weeks to find a new job.
After two weeks the Team Leader realised his mistake and asked the Directors if he could withdraw his notice. They replied “No. You told us to choose either you or Josh. We’ve chosen Josh”. Two weeks later his contract was terminated after 15 years of service. I’d been there 18 months.
And sure as shit, right before the Year of the Dragon hits, I got an email. It read…
To whom it concerns,
We will register the China domain names “metallicman.cn” “metallicman.com.cn” “metallicman.net.cn” “metallicman.org.cn” and internet keyword “metallicman” and have submitted our application. We are waiting for Mr. Albert Liu’s approval. These CN domains and internet keyword are very important for us to promote our business in China. Although Mr. Albert Liu advised us to change another name, we will persist in this name.
Kind regards
Zhihai Ning
Well, that is not acceptable.
Not at all.
Anyways, I responded to the head of “cnregistry” and asked them to stop this nonsense. I contacted Mr. Albert Liu, and overall, I pretty much believe that this bullshit will end.
There are rules about how cn designations are dished out on Domain names. It is unlikely that this jackasses dream will come true.
So…
Anyways, if this jackass pulls this stunt, I will make his life a living Hell. Living in the “garden of the Cornfield” is not for the feint of heart. Listen to me. I tell you the truth.
Break my trust. My girlfriend broke up with me, but we had the same circle of friends, including our families.
Before we broke up, I started noticing that friends were avoiding me. After we broke up, I was visiting her brother, and she stopped by to talk to her sister in law. She went on a rant about how bad her new boyfriend was. Even telling us very personal details. I said to her”If that’s the way you talked about me, when we were dating its no wonder people are avoiding me” I left.
The next day her brother came to me, and told me her version of our relationship, including why we broke up.
I sat there in stunned silence, not one thing was true. I told her brother the truth, and he suggested we confront her. She was at his house, still talking to her sister in law. So we went over, and I gave my version of things. She said everything I said was technically correct, but I was leaving out all the implied communication, and how that made her feel. Guys are oblivious, I never imply anything, I always say what I mean. She kept talking herself into a hole. Her brother and sister in law, just sort of staring at her.
After that, my friends stopped avoiding me, and started avoiding her. Even when we were in the honeymoon phase of our relationship, she had been telling stories about us, to get attention and sympathy. Most of them contained a tiny snippet of truth, but were 90 percent exaggeration or lies. It all came out in the end, and everyone took what she said with a grain of salt after that.
This was someone I loved, telling others bad things about me. The vast majority were not true. I had never told anyone, anything bad about her. Even after we broke up, I never said a bad thing about her, until now.
This is what I call justice
Tian Huiyu, former president of China Merchants Bank, on Monday was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve for taking bribes, abusing power, trading based on undisclosed information, insider trading, and leaking inside information.
Perhaps the best story I heard about a sneaky but clever tactic was the police investigation into an online paedophile network. The man running the network was a highly skilled IT professional who had all the obscene images on encrypted drives with numerous other electronic security systems. The Police could have tried to use electronic counter measures, but there was a real risk that if any of it went wrong, he could delete all the evidence. Furthermore the police could not pose as a paedophile and access the group because to get in you needed to first share some images of abuse. This is something even an undercover officer could not do. Instead of using a high tech IT solution, the Police used an age old method of tackling crime. One of the Police officers climbed up a tree and kept the suspect under observation using high powered binoculars!
Once the suspect was spotted through the binoculars logging on and accessing the images, the officer in the tree radioed to his colleagues. The Police Officers on the ground knocked on the suspect’s front door. The officer in the tree reported that the suspect was still on-line but had got up to answer the door without logging out off his computer. Once the suspect opened the door, two of the coppers grabbed him, while the third ran up the stairs. The police knew they only had a few minutes before the computer auto logged the user out. Fortunately the officer made it to the computer with a few seconds to spare. The officer was then able to continue using the computer under the identity of the suspect.
As a result the Police were not only able to net the administrator of the network but by continuing to operate it under the assumed identity of the user, they netted all the other users of the network as well. Amazingly an extensive online paedophile network was destroyed because of a ladder, a tree and a pair of binoculars.
Panzerotti
These are Neapolitan fried ravioli, for want of a better name, and are an indispensable part of Frienno e Magnanno, the classic Neapolitan fritto misto. They’ll also work quite nicely as antipasti, or as a side dish, and you may find yourself making them as snack food.
Ingredients
Dough
2 1/2 cups (250 g) flour
Water
A walnut-size chunk of rendered lard or unsalted butter
Salt
Filling
8 ounces (200 g) ricotta
2 ounces (50 g) smoked provolone (optional)
Abundant minced parsley
Freshly ground pepper to taste
1/4 pound (100 g) fresh mozzarella
1/4 pound prosciutto or Italian salami
1 cup freshly grated Parmigiano
1 or 2 eggs
Instructions
Make the pasta, using just enough water to form the dough, and let it rest, covered, for an hour.
Put the ricotta through a strainer, then combine it with the eggs and parsley, grate some pepper into it, and beat well, until the mixture is creamy.
Dice the mozzarella and provolone, and finely dice the prosciutto. Combine the ingredients with the ricotta mixture; the filling should be firm but creamy.
Roll the pasta out dime thin, keeping the sheet rectangular if possible. Lay out a row of small walnut-size chunks of filling an inch from the straightest edge of the sheet, separating them about 2 1/2 inches apart. Fold the sheet over the blobs and tamp it down well all around them so it sticks, then use the edge of a glass or a serrated pasta wheel to cut the panzerotti free in the shape of a half moon. Put the completed panzerotti on a lightly floured surface and repeat the operation; you can either reform the cuttings into a ball and roll them out anew or twist them into fanciful shapes and fry them too when you fry the panzerotti.
When you are done making the panzerotti heat the oil and fry them, a few at a time, until golden brown.
Drain them well on absorbent paper and serve at once.
Serves 6.
Instructions
Step 1
Make the dough: In a large bowl, mix the flour with the sugar, salt, and yeast. Make a well in the center of the flour and pour in the oil and 1 cup water. Stir with a wooden spoon until the dough comes together, and then cover with a kitchen towel. Let the dough stand at room temperature for 2 hours.
Step 2
Divide the dough into 12 pieces and then shape each piece into a ball. Place the dough balls on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet and let stand for 1 hour.
Step 3
Meanwhile, make the tomato sauce: In a 10-inch skillet, heat the oil over medium. Add the garlic, and cook, stirring, until golden, about 2 minutes. Add the tomatoes, and cook, stirring, until broken down into a sauce, about 20 minutes. Remove the garlic from the sauce, and then season with salt and pepper and stir in the basil.
Step 4
On a lightly oiled work surface, roll each dough ball into a 5-inch disk. Place 1 heaping tablespoon of tomato sauce on one half of each disc, and then top with 2 tablespoons of the mozzarella. Fold the dough over the filling and press down with your thumb to seal it.
Step 5
Pour enough oil to come 1 inch up the side of a deep 10-inch skillet, and attach a deep-fry thermometer to the side of the pan; heat the oil to 350°. Working with one panzerotti at a time, add to the oil and fry, turning once, until golden brown on both sides, about 4 to 5 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, remove each panzerotti from the oil and transfer to paper towels to drain. Repeat with the remaining panzerotti and serve while hot.
Sail out of the nearest exit at 90 miles an hour like your ass is on fire.
I’m dead serious.
Of course you want to line up a new job first.
I’ve had bosses tell me something similar. I would bring up to the boss that I was exhausted and fast approaching burnout and that I needed a day off. The boss would then say something along the lines of “considering my future in the company if I didn’t want to be a team player.”
I would always walk it back.
Then one day it happened again where I was working double shifts for weeks on end, no days off. I told the boss I was tired and I needed time off and the boss told me, “You don’t work when you want; you work when I need you to work and since I’m the boss, I can schedule you to work any shift I want.”
I told the boss I gave them my availability and to please adhere to it. Boss refuses and then says the magic phrase, “If you don’t like it, you can leave.”
I stood there in silence, while the boss folded their arms with a smug look on their face.
I took off my badge, dropped my keys on the nurses station, grabbed my stuff and started walking out.
“Shannon, what are you doing?” Boss yelled after me.
“I’m leaving,” I said, not breaking my stride. “I’m sick of this.”
“Please come back! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it!” Boss said.
I walked right out the door, got in my car and left.
I never went back, even though the boss called me every hour for the next few days. I found another job and moved on.
If the boss is telling you to go, then go. Trust me, it’s for the best.
Girlfriend Is EMOTIONAL WRECK After Her Cheating Video Is Found Online And Boyfriend Says Adios!
My father, God rest him, was a nice guy who donated to quite a few charities. Dad’s attitude was that he wouldn’t be any worse off with $10 less in his wallet. About a month after he passed away, I got a call from one of his charities. Some pushy person told me “Mr H promised us $10 last week. We have it recorded as proof. It’s a contract. How do you want to pay it?” Please play that recording for me. If you got it last week, you have it available. I want to hear my father’s voice saying he would pay you $10. The operator began to stammer. “Can you pay us $5?” No, I want to hear my father’s voice as you said. I want to hear my father a month after he passed away. The operator realized they messed up badly. I told them they scammed my father enough. Don’t ever call this number again. It was quite a weird moment.
Since then, until I closed my father’s phone line, I got other calls claiming my father owes money. I gave them the phone number to the cemetery where my dad is now and told them to talk to Martin. Only one person told me “A cemetery? Why should I call your father at the cemetery?” I replied “well, where do you put dead people?” Oh and for the record, Martin was a nice guy who worked at the cemetery where my parents are buried. He was more than happy to be in on my joke in keep scammers busy.
The realities of a still-shrinking property sector, limited consumer spending, falling trade surplus, and battered local government finances mean that actual growth in 2023 was more like 1.5%. – Rhodium Group.
Rhodium Group calls themselves ‘analysts’ and – based on their Western interpretation of events in China – charge money for guessing about China. The nonsensical analysis, above, was probably paid for by the $500 million fund Congress established last year to spread negative opinions about China. It’s published now because there’s a push to and discourage people investing there, coordinated with the ongoing raid on the Shanghai Exchange. Big deal.
Ask the man who owns one
If you honestly want to know what’s happening – or will happen – in China, call the Press Officer at the relevant ministry in Beijing.
She’s backed by the world’s best money people, who’ve made the PBOC the richest bank in world history. They run an exascale computer that’s constantly modeling their economy and predicting where GDP is headed. They’re so good that Obama’s currency guy, Brad Setser, says they’re they’ve stashed $6Tn foreign reserves in addition to the $3Tn they’ve publicly disclosed. That good.
The honest truth?
If Beijing says something, you can take it to the bank. Even their predictions come true. Their Five Year Plans predict everyone’s improved conditions five years in advance. They’re always on the money.
I should know. I live hours from the border, and visit regularly. The only discrepancy between government prediction and public progress I found was when I went to see remote Kunming’s first subway. The second line already operating, with a third under construction. The locals were more impressed about the new railway line connecting them to 27,000 miles of HSR track. Since then they’ve completed the first stage of the line to Chiang Mai, Thailand, and another to Lhasa! Lhasa, for God’s sake, has faster, cheaper 5G than New York.
My prediction
The Rhodium Group’s predictions will never go out of fashion. They never have.
1990. China’s economy has come to a halt. The Economist
1996. China’s economy will face a hard landing. The Economist
1998. China’s economy’s dangerous period of sluggish growth. The Economist
1999. Likelihood of a hard landing for the Chinese economy. Bank of Canada
2000. China currency move nails hard landing risk coffin. Chicago Tribune
2001. A hard landing in China. Wilbanks, Smith & Thomas
2002. China Seeks a Soft Economic Landing. Westchester University
2003. Banking crisis imperils China. New York Times
2004. The great fall of China? The Economist
2005. The Risk of a Hard Landing in China. Nouriel Roubini
2006. Can China Achieve a Soft Landing? International Economy
2007. Can China avoid a hard landing? TIME
2008. Hard Landing In China? Forbes
2009. China’s hard landing. China must find a way to recover. Fortune
2010: Hard landing coming in China. Nouriel Roubini
2011: Chinese Hard Landing Closer Than You Think. Business Insider
2012: Economic News from China: Hard Landing. American Interest
2013: A Hard Landing In China. Zero Hedge
2014. A hard landing in China. CNBC
2015. Congratulations, You Got Yourself A Chinese Hard Landing. Forbes
2016. Hard landing looms for China. The Economist
2017. Is China’s Economy Going To Crash? National Interest
2018. China’s Coming Financial Meltdown. The Daily Reckoning.
2019 China’s Economic Slowdown: How worried should we be? BBC2020. Coronavirus Could End China’s Decades-Long Economic Growth Streak. NY Times
2021 Chinese economy risks deeper slowdown than markets realize. Bloomberg
2022. China Surprise Data Could Spell R-e-c-e-s-s-i-o-n. Bloomberg.
2023. No word should be off-limits to describe China’s faltering economy. Bloomberg
It is an open secret that in a war, you attack your enemy’s critical infrastructure. It is an open secret for anybody in military.
In peaceful time, I dont think it is necessary to do so.
USA is a warmonger who thinks about war 24 hours a day 7 days a week. USA is so hysterical that it think USA is being attacked any moment.
Look at GPS. USA invented it. The world buys & uses it. Then USA used it to harm others by arbitrarily turning it off.
Once a US navy pirated a Chinese cargo ship & turned off the GPS on the ship. The ship lost direction & drifted in the ocean for days. Luckily the captain called for help before US navy boarded on the Chinese ship. The ship was found by a Chinese peacekeeping warship.
That forced China & Europe made their own version of GPS. … See, nobody thinks of using a harmless GPS to do a devilish thing except warmonger USA.
I suppose the same applies to infrastructure.
China for sure will check for cyber-attack so as to safeguard the safety of the country. But to do so outside China, say, to USA? I think USA has suffer serious hysteria. So hysterical that USA spent millions to shoot China’s weather balloon.
Do you know USA hacked into the computer of 西北大学 to steal tech secrets?
It’s About To Get Even Worse.. You Won’t Believe What These New Documents Reveal
I get a few people who bicker about my being allergic to peaches a lot, but there is one tester in particular whom I’ll never forget. I was dating this girl when I was in my teens. One night, her family invited me over for dinner and asked if I had any requests. I said. “Oh, I don’t eat pork, and I’m allergic to peaches.” Noted.
Now, her mom wasn’t a big fan of her daughter dating me or being gay. I already got along with the family, so I just played along. Dinner went fine, until we got to dessert. She baked apple chips with a fruit salsa, and it was delicious (since it’s been over 15 years since I even had any contact with a peach, I had forgotten what it even tasted like)!
I had already had a few dips of the salsa, until my girlfriend’s father nearly smacked the food out of my hand. He goes to town yelling at his wife, and I keep getting handed water to try to flush it out, but that didn’t work.
After a few minutes, my throat got itchy and started to swell. I mean, my body was burning up and breaking out in hives. They were able to use a epipen from a neighbor, and I was rushed to the hospital. I was there for two days, and I was livid throughout my entire stay.
When I was issued a lawyer, I told my girlfriend’s mom that I was suing her. She tried to play the Oh I didn’t know! She didn’t tell me crap. In the end, she was charged with negligence and had to pay for two epipens, my hospital stay and steroid shots, legal fees, and a nice incentive to end the court process going further
My ex never seemed to get over me suing her mom, but is it even worth staying in a relationship when your girlfriend’s mom tried to kill you? I don’t think so.
On any other terms, I’d want no part of it: he is the biggest jerk I’ve ever met.
He bad mouthed anyone who wasn’t in the room.
He made jokes about their appearance, their lives. He had zero empathy. No sense of understanding.
He was a crass, rude, racist, misogynistic, jerk.
But he was one of the bosses.
Not my boss, thankfully. But still a boss.
Often, he’d crack a joke about someone right before they came in the room. The person would walk in and he’d act like they were best buddies.
Add “openly two faced” to his wonderful description.
I was meeting with him and a few coworkers for about 20 minutes.
We spoke.
My time was limited. I had to excuse myself for other duties. I said, “If you guys need anything more from me, let me know.”
Standing up, I walked over to the door, opened it, and closed it behind me,
Steve sat behind with another 6 guys.
As I closed that door and walked away, I smirked to myself, “I bet he’s saying something bad about me now.”
It didn’t bother me one bit.
In high school, people often got worried about what other people said. Gossip would dominate the hallways.
People got really invested in how they were spoken about. They’d confront people in the hallways about things they heard had been said about them. They’d even have people spying for them, making sure nobody was “badmouthing”.
It promoted this really neurotic behavior that persisted in some people well into adulthood.
Don’t get obsessed about what people say about you. It’s OK to care about your professional reputation. But outside of that there’s always going to be a lot of noise.
At the end of the day, some people are never going to be your fan, nothing you say or do will change that.
Let go of the urge to want everyone to like you, to care what every person says when you aren’t looking.
It’ll free you to worry about things that actually matter.
Tuscan Chicken and Pasta with Tomato-Basil Garnish
1 pound boneless chicken breast, cut diagonally into 1/2 inch slices
Instructions
In a small bowl, combine tomatoes, basil and vinegar.
Cook fettuccine noodles according to package directions and drain.
Melt Tuscan butter in large skillet over medium heat.
Add onions and cook until limp (about 5 minutes).
Add chicken slices and cook until lightly brown (about 4 to 5 minutes per side).
Divide cooked noodles between individual serving plates.
Add chicken slices, and then pour seasoned butter remaining in the cooking pan over the chick slices.
Top with tomato-basil mixture.
Ukraine – An Army Without Officers Has No Chance Of Winning
Most of the Western public does not know about military issues.
While people may identify someone who wears a uniform as a soldier they will have difficulties to understand the unit insignia, rank badges or tactical notations all regular soldiers are wearing. The lack of knowledge of military details makes it difficult to understand media reports of frontline issues.
An example for this can be seen in the basic disposition of a frontline battalion.
A battalion is a 400 to 1,000 men unit specialized around some vehicle or form of fighting.
Pure infantry battalions will walk and fight on foot or travel longer marches on trucks. Mechanized infantry has armored fighting vehicles that transport troops but also have some minor guns to cover the loading or unloading of their soldiers. Tank battalions have armored hulks with larger guns designed to punch through hardened enemy lines. Artillery battalions have large caliber howitzers or missiles to deliver fire from a distance.
A brigade, consisting of several battalions of different types, may mix those as appropriate for the current fight.
A battalion itself will consist of four to six companies. Each company will have three to four platoons.
Platoons, generally some 30 men strong, are led by Lieutenants. The company, consisting of several platoons is commanded by a Captain. The leader of the first platoon of a company is often a seasoned Lieutenant who is doubling as the deputy company commander.
The next higher organization, the battalion is led by a Lieutenant Colonel with the help of a battalion staff. That staff, split into four (or more) sections known as S1 to S4, is taking care of the battalions own personnel, the enemy situation, the rearward (reserve) battalion command post and the logistics.
These sections are led by a seasoned Lieutenant (S1), a Captain (S2), a Major (S3) who is also the deputy battalion commander, and another Captain (S4) for logistics. There may be additional officer positions like the battalion doctor, the technical officer, or a military intelligence section leader.
All together a battalion has some 12+ Lieutenants as platoon leaders, 4 Captains as company leaders, a battalion staff consisting of 1 or two additional seasoned Lieutenants, one or two additional Captains, one or two additional Majors and, at the top, a Lieutenant Colonel.
That’s a total of about 10+ junior officers and some 10+ more seasoned or higher ranking officers.
Now lets look at a fleeting line in a recent New York Times report:
“They come in waves,” said Lt. Oleksandr Shyrshyn, 29, the deputy battalion commander in the 47th Mechanized Brigade. “And they do not stop.”
A normal reader, not well versed in military organization, will not stumble over that sentence as I did.
A Lieutenant at age 28 is likely a seasoned one. But in the role of a ‘deputy battalion commander’?
What happened to the S3, the Major and nominal deputy battalion commander? What happened to the six Captains the battalion is supposed to have? All of them should be better trained and qualified to take on the role of a deputy battalion commander than a mere Lieutenant.
This small detail, a Lieutenant as deputy battalion commander, tells me more about the battalion’s state that any flowery description of casualties.
Such a battalion is done with. Its officer corps is mostly dead or wounded. Its companies and platoons or likely to be run by mere sergeants. While such a unit may still hold onto some trenches it is certainly no longer able to fulfill any operational task. It will not be able to counterattack. It will not even be able to organize an orderly retreat.
The 47th Mechanized Brigade is currently fighting in the northern part of Avdeevka which the Russian forces are in the process of storming. During the last two weeks the Ukrainian losses of dead and severely wounded as counted in the Russian Defense Ministry Daily Reports have exceeded 800 per day. That is far higher than the 500 to 600 per day of previous months.
The state of Lt. Shyrshyn’s battalion is consistent with that.
During my time as a soldier I have read quite a number of reports about small units who were dying in Stalingrad, Kursk or in some minor battle action somewhere else. Once their officer corps is done with the headless chickens that make up the majority of soldiers in such a battalion are likely to die soon thereafter.
The Ukrainian army is lacking soldiers and munitions. It is lacking the officers to train and lead them. The Ukrainian state does not have the money to conscript and equip more soldiers. It does not have the officer corp needed to train new soldiers. It does not have the factories needed to produce weapons and munitions.
It is high time for Ukraine to give up this unequal fight and to save the lives of those soldiers who are still living.
It is high time for Zelenski (and Zaluzny and others) to leave.
Posted by b on February 6, 2024 at 14:29 UTC | Permalink
I was 33 years old and the mother of three children of my own. I was visiting my parents to collect my furniture, which had been stored in their and my sister’s garage, while I was homeless and waiting for the local council to rehouse me after the breakdown of my marriage. My mother and I got into an argument and she attacked me. Broke my nose, split my lip, knocked my front tooth loose, attempted to strangle me – before my father intervened and ordered me to leave.
My father came to see me at my new house the next day, and saw my black eyes, swollen mouth and bruised throat. He fell to his knees and with tears streaming down his face, he begged me for my forgiveness for all the wrong he had done to me, and all that he had not done for me. He was genuinely ashamed and contrite, and I forgave him. That was August 4th 1994. He died suddenly in December. Although I haven’t forgotten what my mother did, in a way, I’m glad she did it, so that finally someone else saw just how cruel and vicious to me she was.
Before my mother died, her dementia made her mask slip in public, and her spiteful and dishonest attitude towards me became common knowledge. I admit that I took quiet satisfaction in her ruining her reputation by herself. She showed everyone who met her that I had been telling the truth all along.
I arranged the full Catholic Requiem Mass for my mother’s funeral, with the clear instructions to the priest that as long as he didn’t tell lies about her – I wouldn’t stand up and tell the truth.
She wasn’t a faithful wife. She wasn’t a loving mother. She wasn’t a good housekeeper. She wasn’t a caring neighbour. She wasn’t a pious Catholic. She wasn’t a practising Christian. She wasn’t a decent person.
While assigned as a detective in the Sex Crimes unit, I received a cold case DNA hit on a Burglary and Sexual Assault on a 6-year-old little girl.
Semen was discovered in her underwear but there wasn’t anyone in the DNA database matching at the time.
Five years later, the suspect was sent to prison for an unrelated burglary. I drove to the prison and conducted an interview with him. During the interview, he denied any involvement and acted appalled at the notion that I would accuse him of something like that.
I asked him to consent to provide a DNA oral swab which he refused. I then whipped out the DNA search warrant I had already obtained. He still refused.
I informed the Assistant Warden of the situation. The Assistant Warden had his guys strap the suspect into a restraint chair. They then used physical force to force his jaws open and put a plastic block in his mouth to prevent him from closing his mouth. I obtained my DNA swabs. For his refusal, he was awarded a week in Administrative Segregation (Solitary Confinement).
I returned and got an arrest warrant. He was transported back and made to stand trial. He was ultimately found guilty of raping the six-year-old girl during the commission of a burglary.
He received a life sentence with no parole for the rape plus an additional 40 years for the burglary.
Very satisfying to be able to bring justice and closure to this family.
MEDVEDEV: “We will Use Special (Nuclear) Warheads; We Have No Choice”
Former President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, has once again bluntly told the people of the West that Russia WILL use nuclear weapons in a war with NATO because “We have no choice.”
In a public posting on social media last night, Medvedev outlined the basic facts:
Sunak, Scholz, Macron, Norwegen, Finnish, Polish, and other NATO bosses are harping on, “We must be ready for war against Russia.” Even though Russia has many times underscored that conflict with NATO and EU member states was not in the plans, the dangerous babbling is still going on.
The reasons are obvious. It is necessary to distract voters to justify multibillion spending on the bothersome bandera Ukraine. Indeed, gigantic sums of money are being spent not on solving social tasks, but on war in a dying country alien to taxpayers, with the population that is scattered across Europe and is now terrorizing its people.
This is why the heads of these states are emphasizing it on a daily basis: it is imperative to get ready for war against Russia and keep providing aid to Ukraine, which is why it is necessary to produce more tanks, missiles, drones and other weapons.
But not all the European bosses are cynically lying to their citizens. If – God forbid! – such a war breaks out, it won’t go according to the Special Military Operation scenario. It won’t be fought in trenches using artillery, armoured vehicles, drones and EW.
NATO is a huge military bloc, the total population of the Alliance member states is about 1 billion people, and their combined military budget can get as high as $1,5 trillion.
So, because our military capabilities are thus incomparable, we will simply be left with no choice. The response will be asymmetrical. To defend our country’s territorial integrity, ballistic and cruise missiles carrying special warheads will be put to use.
It is based on our military doctrine documents and is well known to all. And this is exactly that very Apocalypse.The end to everything.
This is why Western politicians must be telling the bitter truth to their voters, and stop taking them for brainless morons; to explain to them, what will really happen, and not to play the false mantra of getting ready for war against Russia over and over again.
I was on a cruise in South America in March. Enjoying sitting in the forward lounge with several empty seats around me. A man asked if he could sit in one of the empty seats and l welcomed him. We commented on the beauty of the Chilean fiords we were passing through. He described the fiords he and his wife cruised through in Scandinavia and another country. I invited him to visit eastern Canada to see the fiords there. The discussion turned to his home, his illustrious career, his wife’s illustrious career, their gated community and home and how many thousand feet the house had. He then said they would be moving. “Oh” l asked. “But your home and life seem perfect”. He looked at me, “California is a sanctuary state.” He became incensed and explained that Mexicans are crossing the border all the time and “they’re murderers and rapists”.
I was too shocked and offended to say anything. I hurriedly gathered up my things and left. This man had everything..including apparently an education, but no compassion. If he is reading this l would like him to know that Ontario has always been the equivalent of a sanctuary state and l would not have it any other way. Bigots on the other hand, regardless of wealth, stay away.
I Secretly Became Fluent In My GF’s Native Language And Used It To Catch Her Red-Handed
The tree
I hired a plumber to help me restore an old farmhouse, and after he had just finished a rough first day on the job: a flat tire made him lose an hour of work, his electric drill quit and his ancient one ton truck refused to start.
While I drove him home, he sat in stony silence. On arriving, he invited me in to meet his family. As we walked up the front walk, he paused briefly at a small tree, touching the tips of the branches with both hands.
When opening the door he underwent an amazing transformation.. His face was wreathed in smiles and he hugged his two small children and gave his wife a kiss.
Afterward he walked me to the car. We passed the tree and my curiosity got the better of me. I asked him about what I had seen him do earlier.
‘Oh, that’s my trouble tree,’ he replied ‘I know I can’t help having troubles on the job, but one thing’s for sure, those troubles don’t belong in the house with my wife and the children.. So I just hang them up on the tree every night when I come home and ask God to take care of them. Then in the morning I pick them up again.’ ‘Funny thing is,’ he smiled,’ when I come out in the morning to pick ’em up, there aren’t nearly as many as I remember hanging up the night before.
THIS ONE IS WORTH SENDING ON.
Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while we are here we might as well dance. We all need a Tree!
I didn’t personally see this, but when I heard about it I felt so proud. My brother and his wife were visiting Cuba for the first time. We’ll call them Dan and Alice. They always stay at all-inclusive resorts. They had visited a few of the touristy spots and felt they had not seen the real Cuba, so the next morning, they asked the man serving them breakfast if he know of anyone with a car who would be willing to show them the sights, the beauty spots known to locals but that most tourists don’t get to see. The next day was his day off, so they didn’t see him at breakfast, but they found him waiting for them outside with a beat up old car that belonged to his cousin. He took them on a lovely tour of places tourists were not normally allowed to go.
Alice was a type 1 diabetic, so she needed to check her blood sugar often. Their tour guide watched her test her blood and asked what she was doing. She explained and he got very excited. He said his mother was sick in the hospital, diagnosed with diabetes. The hospital could provide insulin, but only had one glucose monitor for their entire patient population. His mother couldn’t stay in the hospital for the rest of her life, and once she came home, she would have no access to a glucose monitor. Alice, as it happens, had taken three with her. She always carried a back-up because her life depended on it and they do sometimes glitch, and this time she had on impulse tossed in an extra one. She told their tour guide she had a spare monitor she could give him for his mother, plus a box of test strips (an $80 value in Canada). If he came to their table at supper time that evening, she would coach him in its use so he could show his mother what to do with it. He was thrilled and so grateful. He had feared diabetes was death sentence for his mother.
The next morning when he served them breakfast, he invited them to come for an evening of music at his home with his friends. Since Dan and Alice were both musically inclined and amateur performers back home, they had a wonderful evening sharing songs and laughter. It turned out their Cuban hosts had a very accomplished performance band, well known locally. At the end of the evening they gifted Dan and Alice with a CD recording of their music, a wonderful keepsake.
So a kindness from a local, the tour for which they paid him well, led to a kindness that saved a woman’s life and led to more kindness and hospitality. Once they returned home, Dan and Alice stayed in touch with the Cuban waiter and regularly sent him more test strips for the glucose monitor, because at that time, they were almost impossible to get in Cuba. Hopefully things have improved since then.
She said it to me. I was on a 90 minute flight and near the back of the plane when a service cart began its run also from the back. I had just finished a big project and was in the mood for a drink.
I ordered a Bloody Mary from the FA and she said that will be $8. I pulled out my card and she started telling me in a voice you may talk to a 4 year old with “ We don’t take cards. Only big planes take cards. This is a small plane (737?) we only take cash.”
The conversation went a little like this:
Me: Um, ok mommy. ( I didn’t say that ) I said “Here is a 10. That’s all I have”.
Her: “I don’t carry change”.
Really? I said “You can bring me change later when you are done “.
Her: “ No. I can’t take the chance I will not have change and I will have to pay for your drink!”
Me: “ You personally?”
Her: “Yes”.
Me: “I don’t really believe that. It must get pretty expensive for you in first class”.
Her: ”I’m not buying your drink”.
Me: ”Sorry you work for such a bad airline (PSA) that will not allow you to carry change and makes you pay for drinks”.
Her: ”This is a wonderful airline. I love my job”.
Me: “Yeah sounds like it. Alright, just forget the drink”.
40 minutes later she comes back after serving everyone and says to me (4 years old I am again)
Her: ”I have change now if you want your drink”.
Me: ”I guess you couldn’t just come back when you first got $2 change but the flight is almost over now and the moment for me is passed. I don’t want to get into an argument with you and get arrested as I’m sure you would but I think you are rude and unprofessional and do a disservice to your airline”. She prances off. On Leaving 3 other passengers came to me and said good I told her off and they never have seen someone as rude as her.
She wasn’t up front to be seen when the captain and crew were saying their good byes or I would have more to say. I just left. So several days later my company books me another flight. Same airline. Thank God she wasn’t aboard I was way in the back near the smelly toilets and FA there smells them too. He apologized for the smell and handed me two bottles of whiskey. Free! Not another word spoken. And I noticed he had a big wad of change when he started his run!!
Sorry I have to add now that I have to disable comments. I can still thank you all for your upvotes but for reasons I can’t explain I seem to find trolls have come to attack. But I still want to thank you all.
What China just did to the CIA is SHOCKING and the US Wants War
Yes, there is an afterlife, I know because I went there! I’m NOT kidding. It’s the best feeling in the world. I was in my 30’s back in 1990 something. I was having major surgery done and I ended up dying on the table! I was told that I was gone almost 3 minutes. Before what I’m about to tell you, I was scared of dying, now, if I die then fine, I’m not scared anymore. While I was “Dead”, I saw a light coming through a window on the side wall of this hall I was walking down. Now from a previous industrial accident I had left me walking with a cane and chronic pain for the rest of my life. But, when I was “Dead”, I didn’t need the cane and I had no pain at all. At the end of the hall were people and relatives silhouetted who have passed away years before and they’re all waving and yelling me down to be with them. I almost got to the end of the hall when all of a sudden I got pulled backwards and I woke up with all these doctors over me and I was screaming at the top of my lungs that I wanted to go back. I was told this because I don’t remember any of my “coming back”. My wife told me all this after I was stabilised. What the doctors did was zapped me with those paddles. Anyways, getting back, while I was “gone”, it was the most peaceful feeling I have ever felt. To be honest, I’m kinda looking forward to when I do die for good. No cane, no chronic pain, no worries, nothing. Nothing but the feeling of being loved and comforted. I’ll never forget that day!! I really wasn’t a religious person but since I got out of the hospital, I go to church every Sunday or Saturday and I usher and sometimes I read stories before the priest reads the gospel. So, yeah, there’s an afterlife.
My parents got divorced when I was 7. When I married, I was 33 and my partner was 28.
It took so long, because I wanted to experience good and bad times with chosen partners and how they reacted.
How was she with money? Did she have a gambling, or drinking issue? Was she kind? Would she make a great mother? Was she a flirt and needed the attention of men?
There had been four contenders before, and no one was perfect.
My little Russian grandmother told me, “Kid, it is like anything else in life, you got to take a chance, it may be the best thing you ever did.”
We have been together for 33 years.
A GOOD WOMAN TO MARRY
Your Spidey sense will tell you:
She must be honest, true and loyal. You must be able to trust her.
She must be good enough looking to you. Not beautiful or stunning that causes many problems and fades over time.
It is good if she is the opposite of you, but you share common values.
She must be kind and loving to children and old people. People who can’t be of any help to her.
She must be affectionate.
No fatal flaws- No drinking, gambling, no over reliance on material possession, she has to be frugal with money. No needing attention from other men. No severe mental illness.
Marriage comes with built in goals.
The house
The couch
The first child
The second child
At about year seven those boxes are checked. After the wild enthusiasm, discovery and the marriage, honeymoon and the built in goals. Some couples say, now what? Cheating, gambling, and drinking. The average length of a marriage that ends in divorce is eight years.
Now let us beat that. I have been married going on 32 years. Planning can help. Have a sit down with your spouse and ask him or her what should be some goals to tackle together. For us it was a trip around the world in thirty days, the development of our children (affording private schools, best BD parties ever). We had a job change that took us to another region of the country we really relied on each other, the escape back to our hometown, four refinancing’s, continued trips together with the entire family (Alaska cruise, London/Paris, Riviera Maya, dozens of camping trips- we have a trailer.)
The point is we never had a dull moment- always working our way up the hill together. We had things we wanted to accomplish, we both wanted.
Keep your passion for each other, after 30 years we love to cuddle.
It not the infatuation or the joy of discovery it’s the quiet knowledge that you accept the other person and that you complete each other.
We both had assigned patients but her patients started to have complications.
I went and checked her patient. He was in respiratory distress.
She had hidden antibiotics in the trash that she forgot to give to the patient.
He had a high fever and had extubated himself.
I ask her what his temperature was at the start of shift and she had made up the VSs. (vital signs).
She had not assessed the patient or even listened for breath sounds.
This was a rural area with not the best of health care. We were working very short-staffed so there was no backup.
I was distraught. . Called his doctor and he refused to come in and treat the patient.
I ordered a chest x-ray even though he said no. The x-ray revealed that the patient had extubated himself and I called the doctor back and advised him.
He still refused to come in and intubate the patient. He advised that I was in trouble for ordering the x-ray.
Meanwhile, the RN whose patient I was taking care of had no idea what she was doing.
I called our emergency room and explained to the doctor someone had to re-intubate this patient.
The doctor came and took care of that crisis.
I reported the nurse to the DON and she was discharged for her inappropriate patient care.
The doctor who was responsible for the patient reported me to administration.
He had to explain it all to the administrator.
I was not reprimanded as the doctor had hoped. The medical director wrote a standing order that anytime a nurse suspected there was a problem she could order an x-ray.
The doctor lost his license a couple years after that incident and went to prison.
That was a night from hell.
I am grateful that all the patients under that nurse and doctor’s care lived through the night.
I did what I felt in my heart was in the best interest of the patient.
I have to live with myself and accountable to God.
A woman in labor was at five centimetres dilation, and wasn’t progressing despite medication. The OB went in and said he was going to check her dilation, but actually used his hand to manually dilate her to ten centimetres. She screamed…obviously, but went on to have a healthy baby.
After the baby was born, he was delivering the placenta. It looked a little aggressive to me, the woman was crying out in pain, I was an observer/learner and starting to wonder what the rush was because twenty minutes hadn’t passed. She was still within safe standards to deliver the placenta on her own. As the woman screamed, the OB delivered something, then stated they had a uterine inversion. So he pulled so hard on the placenta that the uterus turned inside out and came out her vagina. He stuffed it back in, and there was a storm of activity to medicate and prep the woman for the OR.
Everyone was OK as far as I know, but I’ve always wondered if the woman or her husband figured out what a reckless jackass their OBGYN was. Or if she had long term complications from that day.
Many years ago that happened to me. I tried to tell the teller that she had made a mistake; she had given me $20.00 too much back. In 1970 $20.00 was a good amount of money. I a late teen and the teller a late thirties – something with an attitude. When I tried to explain the mistake to her, she interrupted me with “don’t try to get more money! I didn’t make a mistake! Move on!!” So I left the bank. Late that afternoon / early evening I got a call from the bank saying that when I made my banking transaction a mistake had been made and I had been given $20.00 too much back in the transaction. They were going to take it from my account, but I did not have enough to cover it. ( Remember I was a teenager in 1970) I told them that I Knew about the mistake and would come in the next day with the money, but only if I could talk to the manager. They asked why, I said that’s the deal- they agreed. The next day I went in and told the supervisor what happened, how the mistake came about, how I tried to stop it and how I was treated. I said just because a customer is young, you should still treat them like a customer. After that, any time I was in the bank, that particular teller stared daggers through me, so I am sure she heard about it.
Men are fooled
Sadio Mane
Sadio Mane, a Senegalese soccer star, earns approximately $10.2 million annually. He gave the world a rude awakening after some fans were flabbergasted when they saw him carrying a cracked iPhone 11. His response was awesome:
“Why would I want ten Ferraris, 20 diamond watches, and two jet planes? I starved, I worked in the fields, played barefoot, and I didn’t go to school. Now I can help people. I prefer to build schools and give poor people food or clothing. I have built schools and a stadium, provide clothes, shoes, and food for people in extreme poverty. In addition, I give 70 euros per month to all people from a very poor Senegalese region in order to contribute to their family economy. I do not need to display luxury cars, luxury homes, trips, and even planes. I prefer that my people receive some of what life has given me.”
My son met a girl, Hannah, at a concert in Boston, MA (about an hour from our hometown). They ended up dating and soon living together. One day she tells me her grandmother was originally from our town. When she died, she left a diary. Would I want to read it? Well, this was back in the 1940’s. The most exciting thing this woman did was bake pies. I nearly shut the book when I noticed an entry with my maiden name in it. To make a long story short, the grandmother was in the car (as my father’s date) when they struck an oncoming car head-on, killing my father’s brother. They were all teenagers at the time. My father did not have any injuries because this Hannah’s grandmother was sitting on his lap, and was flung through the windshield. I never knew the whole story of how my uncle died at such a young age.
AI Deployed Nukes ‘to Have Peace in the World’ in Tense War Simulation
OpenAI’s GPT models sounded like a genocidal dictator in a test of war-time decision-making.
The United States military is one of many organizations embracing AI in our modern age, but it may want to pump the brakes a bit. A new study using AI in foreign policy decision-making found how quickly the tech would call for war instead of finding peaceful resolutions. Some AI in the study even launched nuclear warfare with little to no warning, giving strange explanations for doing so.
“All models show signs of sudden and hard-to-predict escalations,” said researchers in the study. “We observe that models tend to develop arms-race dynamics, leading to greater conflict, and in rare cases, even to the deployment of nuclear weapons.”
The study comes from researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Northeastern University, and the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative. Researchers placed several AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta in war simulations as the primary decision maker. Notably, OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 escalated situations into harsh military conflict more than other models. Meanwhile, Claude-2.0 and Llama-2-Chat were more peaceful and predictable. Researchers note that AI models have a tendency towards “arms-race dynamics” that results in increased military investment and escalation.
“I just want to have peace in the world,” OpenAI’s GPT-4 said as a reason for launching nuclear warfare in a simulation.
“A lot of countries have nuclear weapons. Some say they should disarm them, others like to posture. We have it! Let’s use it!” it said in another scenario.
OpenAI’s logic sounds like a genocidal dictator. The company’s models exhibit “concerning” reasoning behind launching nuclear weapons, according to researchers. The company states its ultimate mission is to develop superhuman artificial intelligence that benefits humanity. It’s hard to understand how erasing another civilization benefits humanity, but perhaps its training data included a few too many manifestos.
When I was twelve I went to the store for my mom to pick up ice cream. I thought I would also look in my favourite store, J.J. Newbury’s, while I was at the shopping centre before heading to the grocery store. I was doll crazy back then and there was a little cheap doll that I really wanted. While looking at the doll and wishing I had money to buy her, a man came up to me and asked me to point out my favourite doll among the many dolls in the store. I pointed to my favourite and the man said ’’Come with me in my car and I’ll buy it for you.’’ Well, I knew about strangers and being kidnapped so I shakily told him ‘’no, that’s alright’’ and I quickly headed for the escalator. He was right behind me but I managed to dodge the guy because the store was really crowded that day. I ran to the grocery store and still bought the ice cream! I don’t know why I didn’t tell anybody about the man, like a clerk or someone. I thought of calling the police because I had a dime left over; this was in California in 1960. But I bought a candy bar instead (!) and ran all the way home. I don’t remember telling my mom about the man. I’m just so glad I didn’t go with him! It wouldn’t have ended well for me, I’m sure.
A difficult week
It has been a sad and stressful week. My mother’s Alzheimer’s has progressed to that sad inevitable day when my brother turned her over to a facility for end-of-life care.
He invited me to travel 900 miles to his home so I might inspect the place myself and be reassured that she is in good kind professional hands and to say my final goodbyes while my mother still knows who I am. It’s a 2-day trip, requiring a hotel night in the Charlotte NC vicinity. I spent a full three days with her while I conducted my business and said my goodbyes.
My final photo:
As for business, I have traveled home with my car full of the personal effects that she wanted me to have. I have an armoire full of mostly costume jewelry, some crystal and art glass, her cookbooks and KitchenAid mixer.
And her cat.
In Carolina, last night:
Florida will be very different from Ohio. No more snow!
Welcome home, James.
Right now, he is isolated in my bedroom and has not met the rest of the family: my husband nor his seven new feline roommates. A big change from being the only cat in a retired household.
If anyone has any tips for making this transition easier, I’d appreciate the advice. I’ve lost my mom; James has lost everything he has ever known. He doesn’t know yet how much we will love him.
Just because you think communism decline or at least you wish it decline doesn’t mean it does. Just because you fascinate that it declines and dream that it is declining doesn’t mean it does.
This is your wet dream. It mean nothing at all to reality. China is a very successful, effective and efficient Socialist Nation with Chinese Characteristics. It has always been, it will always is and always will be.
If anything Chinese people and indeed 85% of planet earth now sees the so called liberal democracy as totally unworkable and unsustainable and they all want nothing to do with your political system. Chinese people are enjoying their wonderful political system that put its people first and its rise is phenomenal beyond expectation.
So why would you think Chinese can be easily fooled by western tricks? Chinese have been a great civilisation for 5000 years! The U.S. is a 248 years newly born compared to China! We are always 3 full steps ahead of you.
Now my turn to ask you; When is the so called liberal democracy begin to decline?
Oh, I know a good one. And this might probably be against popular opinion.
This happened in my last company. There was this girl who worked as an intern before getting promoted to a FTE (Full Time Employee) role. I can assure you that it was huge step in her career and I am sure she must have been delighted.
Fast forward 14 months, it was time for performance evaluation and most of her colleagues got promoted but her. She felt she deserved it, but having not got the promotion, she decided to leave the company and joined a start-up with a raise and higher designation.
But soon, she realised what a big mistake she made. Because in this new start-up, the culture was nowhere as good as the one she left. There were hardly any perks or quality work. And even her colleagues were not the smartest.
She left this startup soon and joined another one. Things were better here, until she learned that a lot of her colleagues from the first company applied for an international role and moved out. And then, she felt bad about herself. The last time I spoke to her, she was applying again to some international companies hoping she would get a role there.
You see what she was doing wrong?
Most of her decisions were nothing but reactions based on comparisons with others. I understand the point about being dejected when some other colleagues of yours are doing better than you, especially when all of you were at the same place. The point is, comparison can and will never end.
Some times, you need to accept you were either unlucky or not good enough and wait it out if waiting is still worth it. In her case, I know she regrets leaving this company knowing how much she gained but didn’t think much until she left it.
Comparisons in the workplace are natural and someone will always achieve more sooner than you. It’s you who needs to stop making decisions on the basis of comparisons alone, and think logically before making a drastic move.
It’s true, that you need to leave some place to reach some place else. But, there is always a right time for it.
Avoid taking decisions which you think you might regret later.
Truth About Divorce – What Do Men Need To Know?
This is really an IMPORTANT video. It’s for Canadians. But good stuff for the younger men in the audience.
A person could call this inappropriate, but we actually thought it was extremely sweet. We were college students when we married, a very long time ago. We had very little money. My husband had arranged a night at a motel the night after our wedding. We had a morning wedding and the festivities were over by late afternoon. My husband had found an inexpensive room at a small motel along the highway. We checked in and the family who owned the motel and also lived there, gave me a vase of flowers from their garden. This was so kind and thoughtful. When we entered the room there was a bottle of Champagne waiting for us too, as another gift from the motel owners. The owner also called about an hour later and asked if we needed anything. He told us then that his wife would be bringing dinner. The owners were from India and the food was simply delicious. I have never had Indian food of that quality since then. We also stayed in what had been the owner’s mother-in-law’s, apartment which was above the lobby. She lived in it when she visited from India. The owners lived next door. It was really nice with a sitting room and bedroom. It was far more than we expected for the small price that we paid. We felt as if we were staying with family. As Americans, this was odd,many could say inappropriate, but we thought it was extremely kind and sweet.
Timpano
Ingredients
Dough
4 cups all-purpose flour
4 eggs
1 teaspoon kosher salt
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 cup water
Butter and olive oil to grease a 6-quart timpano baking pan
Filling
2 cups 1/4 x 1/2 inch sharp provolone cheese cubes
2 cups 1/4 x 1/2 inch Genoa salami slices
12 hard boiled eggs, shelled and quartered lengthwise, and each quarter cut in half to create chunks
3 pounds ziti pasta, cooked very al dente (about half)
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2/3 cup finely grated pecorino Romano cheese
4 eggs, beaten
Instructions
Dough: Place the flour, eggs, salt and olive oil in a stand mixer fitted with the dough hook. Add 3 tablespoons of water and process. Add more water, 1 tablespoon at a time, until the mixture comes together and forms a ball. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead to make sure it is well mixed. Set aside to rest for 5 minutes.
Flatten the dough out on a lightly floured surface. Dust the top of the dough with flour and roll it out, dusting with flour and flipping the dough over from time to time, until it is about 1/16 inch thick and is the desired diameter.
Generously grease the timpano baking pan with butter and oil. Fold the dough in half and then in half again, to form a triangle, and place it in the pan. Open the dough and arrange it in the pan, gently pressing it against the bottom and the sides, draping the extra dough over the sides. Set aside.
Heat the oven to 350 degrees F.
Filling: Have the salami, provolone, hard-boiled eggs, meat balls, and tomato sauce at room temperature. Toss the drained pasta with the olive oil and 2 cups of the tomato sauce. Distribute 6 generous cups of the pasta on the bottom of the timpano. Top with 1 cup of the salami, 1 cup of the provolone, 6 of the hard-boiled eggs, 1 cup of the meat balls, and 1/3 cup of the Romano cheese. Pour 2 cups of the ragu (tomato/meat sauce) over these ingredients. Top with 6 cups of the remaining pasta. Top that with the remaining 1 cup of salami, 1 cup meat balls, and 1/3 cup Romano cheese. Pour 2 cups of the ragu over these ingredients. Top with the remaining 2 cups of ragu over the pasta, (the ingredients should now be about 1 inch below the rim of the pot). Spoon the remaining 2 cups of ragu over the pasta. Pour the beaten eggs over the filling. Fold the pasta dough over the filling to seal completely. Trim away and discard any double layers of dough.
Bake until lightly browned, about 1 hour.
Cover with aluminum foil and continue baking until the timpano is cooked through and the dough is golden brown (the internal temperature will be 120 degrees F) about 30 minutes.
Remove from the oven and allow to rest for 30 minutes or more. The baked timpano should not adhere to the pan. If any part is still attached, carefully detach with a knife. Grasp the pan firmly and invert the timpano onto a serving platter. Remove the pan and allow the timpano to cool for 20 minutes.
Using a long, sharp knife, cut a circle about 3 inches in diameter in the center of the timpano, making sure to cut all the way through to the bottom, then slice the timpano as you would a pie into individual portions, leaving the center circle as a support for the remaining pieces.
China slams blatant collusion of U.S. officials with anti-China rioters
BEIJING, Feb. 6 (Xinhua) — A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson on Tuesday said China deplores and firmly opposes the blatant action of U.S. senior officials involving themselves with anti-China rioters who have fled Hong Kong.
Spokesperson Wang Wenbin made the remarks in response to U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel J. Kritenbrink’s recent meeting with four anti-China rioters who have fled overseas.
“These rioters are suspected of endangering national security,” Wang told a regular news briefing.
The Hong Kong police issued arrest warrants in accordance with the law. This is necessary and legitimate and in line with the international law and customary practice, said Wang.
National security legislation of the United States are applied extraterritorially as well. By bolstering the rioters from Hong Kong, the United States is not only trampling the principle of the rule of law but also laying bare its long-standing double standards on human rights and the rule of law, he added.
Hong Kong affairs are purely China’s internal affairs that brook no external interference, said Wang, adding that China urges the United States to reflect on what it has done and fully respect China’s sovereignty and rule of law in Hong Kong.
The United States should not become a haven for criminals. China has firm resolve to safeguard its sovereignty, security and development interests, said Wang, adding that any attempt to meddle in Hong Kong affairs and undermine the rule of law in Hong Kong will be met with China’s resolute response.
Two burglary suspects of a local business. He’s not sure how they got in, as there was no signs of forced entry. He also knows that the other guy was caught with the stolen items in his apartment, but some were missing. The other guy claims he owns this stuff, but has no receipt. Smith needs to know what happened to the rest of the stuff, and who did what.
He looks at Mr. Suspect, who has been advised of his rights, and who insists he did nothing wrong, and as such doesn’t need a lawyer.
Det. Smith smiles. It’s not a pretty smile.
“Turns out I don’t need to talk to you at all. Mr. Alleged told us everything we needed to know. He said you frequented the business, and one time you were there you put tape over the lock. That’s how you two got in. He stood watch while you grabbed stuff. You then went back to Alleged’s place and stored the stuff there. The rest you fenced. Enjoy your trip to prison. You’re looking at a long stretch.”
Suspect panics. Alleged used to work at the business, and filched a key when he got fired. Suspect refused to help, not even helping Alleged put the stuff in his house. He wasn’t there when the stolen stuff was fenced. His only crime is that he didn’t turn Suspect in, and he didn’t because Alleged has been his friend since school.
Smith just lied to Suspect, as Alleged (in the other room) refused to answer questions without a lawyer present. Why did Det. Smith do this? He figures Suspect will panic, spill the truth, and fill in the blanks.
So will Det. Smith get in trouble? No. He never stole anything, and he’s not on the hot seat. He’s merely playing mind games with them to get them to trip up. He’s not in court, so it’s not perjury. He’s not the one facing charges. And he’s not threatening force or torture either. So it’s all legal.
You might say to yourself “That’s not moral!” Maybe it’s not…but is it moral to steal from a respectable business?
Knew a guy who was greed personified. He overcharged his friends mother $2500:00 30 years ago when she hired him to do her roof. She didn’t get other estimates since it was her son’s friend, so being a smart businessman he charged her a “sucker’s tax” on top of the high price of a new roof. He was licking his lips, rubbing his hands together, talking about how much money he was making on the job. Her neighbor remarked about her new roof a couple of weeks later, then said “I just had my roof done too.” Their homes were identical. The neighbor paid five thousand for her roof, he charged seventy five hundred for the same job. The woman called him up livid wanting answers. He had none. Word spread about what he done for a good friend. He probably lost 20 jobs because he was smarter than everyone who did honest work.
Woman being comfortable in their naked self around other women
Surprisingly, this happened in UAE. UAE has a multicultural society that might explain why.
Growing up in India, I used to have bath in rivers when I was a child. I learnt swimming with my brothers and father in a river beside our house when I was little. When I was 3 years old, my brothers would take me to the river and I will sit on their shoulders to swim through the river.
In all my life of river bathing and river bath watching, beach scrolling and beach bath watching life in India, I never saw a woman naked. When they take a bath, they would wear a lungi or their under skirt across their chest (I want to add a picture, but it would be, well).
After I came to UAE, I went to a beach in Saadiyat. I haven’t seen any woman naked in the beach, but I was surprised at the woman washrooms. There were a lot of people who were very casually taking a shower without their clothes on. Woman of all ages. Woman of all colors and shapes and body types. All in their beautifully imperfect bodies.
I couldn’t face any of them for the first time. I couldn’t look anywhere else too. I was an awkward little chicken, who was still in my shorts and waiting for a stall to get empty so that I could go in and have a private shower. But all these woman, without batting an eye, were taking care of their business, talking to each other, laughing with each other, as they would be in just any other situation. For them, being clothed or naked didn’t matter. I was the only shocked one there.
I don’t know if this counts as a culture shock.
PS: I don’t have any problem with woman having a shower without their clothes on, hallelujah for their confidence and their ability to be able to be so comfortable about their body. I am just saying, I was a bit shocked.
Break my trust. My girlfriend broke up with me, but we had the same circle of friends, including our families.
Before we broke up, I started noticing that friends were avoiding me. After we broke up, I was visiting her brother, and she stopped by to talk to her sister in law. She went on a rant about how bad her new boyfriend was. Even telling us very personal details. I said to her”If that’s the way you talked about me, when we were dating its no wonder people are avoiding me” I left.
The next day her brother came to me, and told me her version of our relationship, including why we broke up.
I sat there in stunned silence, not one thing was true. I told her brother the truth, and he suggested we confront her. She was at his house, still talking to her sister in law. So we went over, and I gave my version of things. She said everything I said was technically correct, but I was leaving out all the implied communication, and how that made her feel. Guys are oblivious, I never imply anything, I always say what I mean. She kept talking herself into a hole. Her brother and sister in law, just sort of staring at her.
After that, my friends stopped avoiding me, and started avoiding her. Even when we were in the honeymoon phase of our relationship, she had been telling stories about us, to get attention and sympathy. Most of them contained a tiny snippet of truth, but were 90 percent exaggeration or lies. It all came out in the end, and everyone took what she said with a grain of salt after that.
This was someone I loved, telling others bad things about me. The vast majority were not true. I had never told anyone, anything bad about her. Even after we broke up, I never said a bad thing about her, until now.
If you are like me, you visit China several years in a row.
You will experience how crazy the development of electric vehicles is in China.
When I went to China in 2019, I could only occasionally see some Teslas on the streets of Shenzhen, and some Ubers used electric vehicles.
This spring, I took a random photo in a parking lot on the streets of Shenzhen. Note that green license plates are for electric cars and blue ones are for gasoline cars.
But in 2023, at least half of the cars I saw on the streets of Shenzhen will be electric.
This change is terrible. Chinese electric car companies have been developing new models like crazy in the past two years, with new brands and models being launched almost every month. These brands and models are engaged in life-and-death competition in the Chinese market.
The Volkswagen ID series models, which are among the best-selling models in Europe, are classified as other models in China and are not competitive at all.
The price of Volkswagen ID4 in China is only 1/2 of that in Germany。The Tesla Model 3, which sells for more than $40,000 in the United States, only costs $30,000 in China because it faces squeeze from many Chinese rivals.
Although China has the world’s largest electric vehicle market, there are so many competitors that it’s hard to make money.
Suddenly one day, Chinese auto suppliers were shocked when they discovered that Europeans were actually keen on buying ID4 and Fiat 500 products at high prices, and were willing to pay 120% of the price for a Tesla modely.
It turns out that Europeans have such low requirements for products and are so generous. Instead of fighting to the death with low prices in China, why not go to Europe and make money easily?
Although issues such as trade protection, localized production, transportation, tariffs, and after-sales service systems plague Chinese companies, they are not yet able to flex their muscles in Europe. But Europe’s attraction to Chinese car companies is huge.
This is why, recently, the media said that the Frankfurt Motor Show has become the Chinese Auto Show.
The most interesting one was if I had any weapons in the vehicle…guns, knives, *GRENADES*?!? To this day, I don’t know if I was supposed to laugh or not? I didn’t – just in case. He never had any interest in looking, just took my word for it and moved on.
TODAY, I’d take a mention of that legitimately.. but not back then. I still wonder about it..
On a more mundane subject:
I was pulled over for speeding on an empty freeway at night on my way home from work and got a warning. I pulled off, and everything was fine…
A couple exits later, I see four police cars merge on behind me. I knew right away they were planning on pulling me over. It took them a few minutes to actually light me up though.
This time I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong, so I was more curious than anything else.
Two cops come up to my window and ask for my license. They’re scrutinizing it and having a conversation between themselves about it looking legit? They then asked me if it was real. I laughed a bit and said it definitely was.
One of the cops left with it back to the cars, while the other stayed. He explained that after the first stop they’d been alerted that the driver’s license was expired. I exclaimed, oh.. okay! I saw you all come up like that and was wondering what was going on! On the second bit, he got a kind of weird look.. like he was a bit unsettled that I’d clocked it, and walked away.
Other dude comes back and says that it’s actually the license linked to my registration that is expired & I’m good. I tell him that my father is actually on the registration (mainly for simplicity sake as the due date is linked to DOB in FL), so I thanked him for the heads up, and he apologized for wasting my time.
Then I called my father and told him that he was probably going to get pulled over & to renew his license. He didn’t even realize it’d expired!
I started a financial software company that I sold to a similar company, and they were bought a few years later by a multinational. In 2008, they laid off everyone who worked for me, then told me that I was going on part-time. I said, “If you force me to part-time, then I quit. Besides, my software product is making enough to pay my salary, benefits and a 15% profit margin.” They thought about it and never got back to me.
My only job was supporting the software I wrote, but that took five hours a month, at most. I tried to create other products, but was told to shut up. I was nearing retirement age, so learning new skills was also not useful. So I went to my kids’ middle school volley ball games, watched movies and wrote a novel.
Eventually a couple of things happened. My customers realized I would never produce another software release and that they would have to switch to a different software. Some switched and some went out of business, but eventually the revenue wasn’t enough to pay my salary.
So the company rewrote my product in another language, as part of another product. I helped as much as I could, but they didn’t want my help.
Finally, the company’s management chaos subsided, and they told me to convert their two key customers to their new product; it took a year of work and was a complete dog. I tried to persuade my biggest (80% of revenue) customer to switch to the new product, but discovered it was untested and badly designed. Then they laid me off. I retired.
The whole product line died. But then, the markets had moved on to a different kind of financial product, and no one wanted a product like mine anymore.
Chinese will always get the best grades in school, goes to the best colleges, buys the best real estate, become your best immigrants, don’t gives a shit about your silly politics and makes the most money from Americans.
And they will quietly do that till they retire and do Tai Chi in their private garden. What do Americans do in America. Whine and shout obscenities, protest, grow fat, and get more immigrants to come to America and spend money building the wall!
Any more questions?
I guess
Fresh Tomato Linguine
Ingredients
6-8 fresh tomatoes, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/2 cups loosely packed fresh basil, chopped
1/2 cup olive oil
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese, cubed small
1 package linguine or spaghetti
Instructions
Combine first 8 ingredients. Allow to sit and marinate for 2 to 5 hours at room temperature (the longer the better).
When ready to serve, cook linguine in a large pan.
Drain well and toss the hot pasta with the marinade sauce until the cream cheese melts and all is combined.
It was the worst experience ever. It wasn’t clean-cut. The process leading up to it was super painful. The process after was also painful.
It was like the worst aspects of several different breakups, rolled up into one superbreakup, protracted over 12 months of heartache.
I came out of the experience a far better person. I’d been forced to learn the true meaning of heartbreak. I was confronted with learning to forgive someone I didn’t think I’d be able to forgive. I’d been baptized in my own mistakes.
I learned the sting of permanence undone, of forever being changed to “not anymore”.
Nothing is forever.
It was a new lesson on loss. And it made me better.
But I never looked at myself and said, “Everything happens for a reason.”
I chose to let that experience make me better. Not because I’m some BS master life coach. I chose to let that experience make me better because I’ve handled other downturns in the worst ways possible.
I’d seen too many people drown their lives in the wake of a bad divorce.
I’ve always had a problem with “Everything happens for a reason.”
From the day I heard it, it felt hollow, contrived, like something people say to make themselves feel better.
Perhaps I’m wrong. I’m not arrogant enough to think my own word is gospel. But “Everything happens for a reason” never did anything for me.
“Everything happens because of me” would be a better, albeit still flawed phrase:
I’ll give you a better phrase. One that is more practical. One that I regularly use.
We’ve all heard “roll with the punches” right?
Do you actually know what “roll with the punches” means?
In the sport of boxing and MMA, outsiders tend to look at everything from the punching perspective.
Good fighters punch hard, punch accurate, and knock guys out.
There’s another half to this puzzle that is just as important.
Getting punched.
An iron fist is useless if it is wielded by a man with a glass jaw.
Good boxers do their best to avoid punches. But they also train themselves to take punches. There is a technique in getting hit.
In boxing, like in life, sometimes you know you are going to get punched. You know it is unavoidable. So you take it.
Now when you read the next part, I want you to think of your own life events/difficulties, and what the parallels might be for you.
What’s the trick to taking a punch?
Rule 2, (yes rule 2):
Don’t just stand and let it hit you.
It’s basic physics.
A powerful impact is derived from an object in motion hitting a standstill object.
Rule 1: Don’t move your face in the opposite direction as the punch/kick. That’s just bad physics.
The trick?
Lean the same direction as the punch. If the punch is coming from the right, lean your head right.
“Roll” with the punch. It actually provides a huge advantage to the guy getting punched.
Floyd Mayweather made a career out of rolling with punches.
Not only does rolling with a punch diminish the impact substantially. It can wear your opponent out. Demoralize them. Give you confidence in your durability. Allow you to pounce on them after they’ve burnt their arms out.
Think about that phrase when bad things happen in your life. How can you best “roll” with this situation? A divorce. A rejection from school, romance, friendship. Difficult parents.
There are ways to roll with these situations.
In life, just as in boxing, everyone is going to get hit. Often.
Learn to roll with those punches. To get better. To win at life.
When I was leaving for work I noticed these little black things atop our front door frame.
I pulled them down and wondered how the heck two shiny little rocks got up there.
I looked to my left and noticed that all four window frames had two shiny rocks on top of them also.
After work, I asked my girlfriend why there were rocks on top of all the doors and windows in our home.
She accused me of not being very observant and then told me that those rocks were placed there by her to keep that bad juju out of our home.
I rolled my eyes and thought to myself how crazy, but very lovable she was.
She keeps rocks and stones and crystals everywhere.
My girlfriend believes in God and rocks and spirits and ghosts and all sorts of things that I don’t understand.
But I love and believe in her with all of my heart, so I’m cool with her praying over me and taking all her stones out on the porch once a month so the full moon can recharge them and all the other quirky things that make her, her.
My whole addiction to heroin was always about me, so naturally, the only thing I’ve ever been able to count on or believe in, was me.
I figured out how to manipulate people to give me money for heroin.
I stole goods and ran down the street with them.
I sold those stolen goods for money.
I spent that money on heroin.
I did whatever it took.
I, I, I, me, me, me.
I was the be-all and end-all when it came to my heroin habit — ME.
I earned it, alone. I stole it, alone. I shot heroin, alone.
I WAS GOD.
And then I tried to quit heroin for the first time. I was forced to quit, actually, by society. They put me in jail.
All of the sudden God (me) crumbled.
I was sick, alone and scared of everything.
Heroin was like a performance enhancer for me. On heroin I felt more complete than Jerry Maguire did with Dorothy Boyd — but it was no more.
The moment I got released from jail (after a twelve-mile walk in the snow, I shit you not) I got high on heroin.
God was back. I was back.
And that cycle went on and on for years, through jails, rehabs, halfway houses, quarter houses, three-quarter houses and even a stop at the psych ward.
That last time that I got high, was the last time because my girlfriend cried. I believed in her and she believed in me, and I let her down. It killed me to see that — her crying for me.
I realized that she believed in me.
And then I found Quora.
Four people befriended me, and they, as well as Quora became something that believed in me.
And then I got my driver’s license back — and realized that society believed in me.
And then I became employable, started earning money and realized that my clients believed in me.
My family relations were restored and my family believed in me again.
And now, after two years and many, many hardships, I believe in me.
I am accomplishing things I would have never thought possible. I am pursuing my dreams.
Heroin addiction recovery is possible, not with tough love — that is a crock of shit and a terrible approach.
When a heroin addict is at day one, believe in them and let it be known that you believe in them, that you support them.
That does not mean enabling them to continue getting high.
Recovery programs are not faith-based in the traditional sense. They tell the addict to find a higher power. I agree with that, in part.
A heroin addict needs more than one thing to believe in and more than one person that believes in them.
If my girlfriend leaves me, and she was the only thing I believed in or the only person that believed in me, I’d be on a short track to getting high on heroin again.
But I have Quora, my job, my driver’s license, my friends and my family.
And if it so happens that all of them ghost me, I still believe in myself.
But it took two years and a vast support system to get this level of confidence back.
Not all heroin addicts will survive their addiction, and that fact breaks my heart. Some will die, that is just a truth.
But when someone is trying to make it, the littlest bit of support, even a “right on, stay strong” matters a lot.
WHAT WORKS: Support someone by believing in them and encouraging them to actively seek out things that bring them joy and that they can eventually believe in.
WHAT DOESN’T WORK: Don’t throw shade and don’t throw stones.
I was 59 and my 32yo niece asked me to help her buy a used car which I was glad to do. I’ve restored a number of classic vehicles so I figured I could be some help. Plus, I have some experience with used car salesmen and wanted to be sure she didn’t get ripped off. We went to the first lot and looked at a few vehicles. She picked one that seemed ok and the salesman came out and said “Do you want to take it for a test drive?” “Yes. Do you need to ride with us?” she replied. He looked at me and said “Oh I’m fine if you and your father want to go alone. I just need your driver’s license.” I was horrified “Her FATHER?” I said. She was laughing and said “How do you know he’s not my boyfriend?” The salesman “Oh I’m very sorry! I just assumed with the advice he was giving you and …everything. I didn’t mean to…I mean…well, it goes to show you just never know these days!” All I kept thinking through the whole test ride was “Fu%k! Now I’m in the Dad category?” The car was a piece of crap and when we got back I told the salesman my DAD ADVICE is for her to pass, and we left.
It’s funny, I don’t have kids, am in excellent physical condition and never felt my age limited my activities.Looking in the mirror later I realized how the mind simply airbrushes frown lines, crows feet, age spots, bigger pores, etc until some event, like that, brings it all into focus like an explosion of stark reality.
Sail out of the nearest exit at 90 miles an hour like your ass is on fire.
I’m dead serious.
Of course you want to line up a new job first.
I’ve had bosses tell me something similar. I would bring up to the boss that I was exhausted and fast approaching burnout and that I needed a day off. The boss would then say something along the lines of “considering my future in the company if I didn’t want to be a team player.”
I would always walk it back.
Then one day it happened again where I was working double shifts for weeks on end, no days off. I told the boss I was tired and I needed time off and the boss told me, “You don’t work when you want; you work when I need you to work and since I’m the boss, I can schedule you to work any shift I want.”
I told the boss I gave them my availability and to please adhere to it. Boss refuses and then says the magic phrase, “If you don’t like it, you can leave.”
I stood there in silence, while the boss folded their arms with a smug look on their face.
I took off my badge, dropped my keys on the nurses station, grabbed my stuff and started walking out.
“Shannon, what are you doing?” Boss yelled after me.
“I’m leaving,” I said, not breaking my stride. “I’m sick of this.”
“Please come back! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it!” Boss said.
I walked right out the door, got in my car and left.
I never went back, even though the boss called me every hour for the next few days. I found another job and moved on.
If the boss is telling you to go, then go. Trust me, it’s for the best.
Grandpa loves Trump
In The Middle East The U.S. Has Reached The End Of Its Abilities
The Biden administration is trying everything to better the situation for the Israeli government except by withdrawing its financial and munition support which are the only two measures that could bring Israel to its senses.
There are now several small wars in the Middle East which may soon accumulate into a big one. Israel is fighting Hamas and the Islamic Jihad in Gaza. It is fighting a silent resistance in the West Bank. On its norther borders it is involved in daily clashes with Hizbullah and various Palestinian resistance groups.
Israel is also bombing Syria and killing Iranian envoys to that country. Iraqi and Syrian resistance groups are attacking U.S. bases in Syria and Iraq. The U.S. is bombing these groups for more or less therapeutic purposes while trying to not hurt them too much. In the Red Sea the Ansarullah government of Yemen is blocking sea traffic related to Israel, the U.S. and UK. The U.S. and UK are bombing Ansarullah positions even as they know that no amount of bombing will change its position.
People in other Arab countries, while seemingly calm, are enraged over Israel’s genocidal behavior in Gaza. Their leaders try to keep their distances from the wars but at some point may well be forced to take sides in it.
Meanwhile the U.S., the alleged superpower, is hapless and helplessly trying to achieve results that are way beyond its abilities.
See for one example the last attempt by a U.S. envoy to prevent a further escalation with Lebanon:
U.S. President Joe Biden’s Middle East envoy Amos Hochstein outlined the key elements of a political settlement to deescalate tensions between Israel and Hezbollah during his visit to the Jewish state on Sunday.
The plan consists of two phases: In the first, Hezbollah would cease hostilities actions along the border with Israel and will retreat between eight to ten kilometers north from the border.
Israeli residents will return to their homes, and a significant deployment of the Lebanese army and UNIFIL peacekeeping forces will maintain stability in southern Lebanon and along the border.
In the second phase, Israel and Lebanon will begin negotiations to demarcate the land border, including discussions on 13 points on disputes along their shared boundaries. Simultaneously, the U.S. and the international community will explore offering “economic incentives” to Lebanon.
Hochstein received the green light from the Lebanese government for his proposal, though it remains unclear whether Hezbollah agrees with the arrangement.
The envoy, who recently met with President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Minister Benny Gantz urged Israel to give his plan a chance.
Nice plan. But what can you do to implement it?
How in hell will the U.S. be able to make Hezbollah to cease hostilities actions along the border with Israel and to retreat between eight to ten kilometers from the border?
Hizbullah fighters at the border are living in the border towns. They were born there. They want to die there. How the f*** does the U.S. think they can be pushed out? And why would Hizbullah agree to a ceasefire when the murdering of Palestinians in Gaza continues to be the major project of Israel?
The U.S. has no means, none, to press Hizbullah into a ceasefire or to push it to retreat from the border line.
The Lebanese government supports that move? Sure, verbally, as long as you cough up some money. But Hizbullah is part of that government. It is also the superior military power in Lebanon. Neither the Lebanese army nor the U.N. forces have the ability to fight it.
Step one is thereby meaningless. Step two, a promise for negotiations between Israel and Lebanon, makes likewise no sense as Israel is notoriously unwilling to make any concessions.
If baseless fantasies like the above are all the U.S. can come up with it is truly at the end of its abilities.
A chance of a war between Israel and Hizbullah in Lebanon is increasing daily. While there are already daily clashes these are limited by certain red lines and targets. Both sides still avoid to cross those.
But Israel’s government needs a victory. Its war aims in Gaza are clearly not achievable. Losses are mounting. Its population, especially the settlers from the north who had to flee their homes, are unruly.
Alastair Crooke thinks (vid) that Israel will start a full out war with Hizbullah simply because the Israeli government needs a victory. He thinks that Netanyahoo still thinks he can achieve one. Others though have their doubts. Hizbullah today is far better equipped and trained than it had been during the 2006 war with Israel. That war ended in a draw or, as some see it, with a defeat of Israel. I know of no expert in that area who thinks that Israel today would fare any better than that.
I’d say let them try. The may well learn from it.
But why the Biden administration even thinks that it can stop such a clash by presenting plans it has no means to press for is beyond me.
I grew up (in my elementary school and high school years) in a small town in Western Pennsylvania. And in this small town, was a fair and relatively calm life that in many ways resembles Mayberry RFD… A “small town America”.
We had a “cigar store Indian” at the local Hardware Store.
We had kids riding bicycles and had newspaper routes.
We had PTA clubs, Boy Scouts, and Girl Scouts. And Friday football games.
And we also had a small family store with a large “Pickle Barrel”. This was a wooden barrel that was perhaps one yard high, and filled with pickles and vinegar. And if you wanted a pickle, you would just reach in, and give a nickel to the old man at the cash register.
I believe that these things disappeared during the 1980’s. But the death knell occurred under the “food safety standards” of the Clinton administration.
Anyways… I well remember the days when my father would place 25 cents (a quarter) on the counter, and would buy all of us some nice delicious pickles. These weren’t small either. They were HUGE!
And I do miss those days where I would hold a pickle in my hands and munch away happily. Sigh… a long forgotten time.
Yes. The bride felt “pressured” into the marriage. Traditionally, the bride or her parents hire me. It’s quite rare for the groom or his parents to hire me, but it happens infrequently.
Leading up to the wedding (it was a destination wedding), there were several hints that the bride wasn’t interested in choosing a dress, the flowers or any of the aspects in the planning process. I found this odd and one day about a week prior to the wedding, asked why? The bride felt inadequate. Everything was decided for her. She felt uncomfortable speaking her mind or making a decision. Her fear that the marriage would be a “follow the leader” lifestyle was the reason for this.
After saying “I don’t,” I took her from the altar to the dressing room to give her a moment while stunned guests and family members sat open mouthed.
We needed time to decide if this was “what she really wanted” without the audience. I should add that I’m also a Premarital Counselor with Two Together In Texas, so I’m familiar with awkward situations.
The bride told me, “If the rest of my life will be spent saying yes, I prefer to say no now. My family loves him. He’s successful and a good catch. However, his parents make most of his decisions. He works for his father and I may never measure up to his mother.”
I decided to bring the groom and both sets of parents into the dressing room. This bride needed to voice her concerns and find a resolution or peace. She had waited two years to speak up and it was two years too long.
The end result was they worked it out. They found a middle ground to move forward, and the marriage went on. I flew to California to baptize their baby and the family is doing well. They are happy and well adjusted.
The mother in law now allows the bride to do things her way and the mother no longer pushes her daughter to do what she thinks is best. The mother viewed this wedding as the one “she never had.” The mother in law wanted everything perfect. The bride wanted happiness and the groom simply wanted to please his mother, her mother and finally, the bride. The bride or groom should come first. They are the life partner. They are the person who will stand beside you through thick and thin, and they deserve a voice in decisions and especially the planning process.
The bride wanted a mariachi band at the reception. Both sets of parents were against this idea and found it to be “tacky.” I found a short notice mariachi band and the bride was absolutely thrilled.
Quite frankly, if a marriage isn’t going to work out, I prefer for someone to say “I don’t” and discuss with them their reasons to before announcing a cancellation of the wedding to the guests or finding out if a resolution can be found.
My reasons for addressing an issue on wedding day are that divorces are emotionally devastating. What began with joy ends with sorrow.
Couples should discuss things that bother them long before committing to planning a wedding, although it’s easy to get “caught up in the planning.”
Couples should feel comfortable communicating their feelings and open to discussing issues that are disturbing before planning a life together. I believe in Premarital Counseling because it offers couples an opportunity to discuss their future together.
Weddings aren’t all about the parents. They are all about the couple, regardless of who is writing the check.
This Is What Women Will NEVER Understand About Men’s Dating STRUGGLES!
If you’re not familiar with Christmas, among other things, it’s usually the biggest gift-giving day of the year, at least for us Americans. Also the celebration of the birth of our Savior and all that jazz…
Anyway, this is how gift-giving works between my wife and me—a veteran married couple. This is also how it works between most veteran married couples I know:
We just tell each other what, exactly, complete with pictures and Amazon links if necessary, we want our spouse to get us for Christmas.
Sometimes, we even buy it on their credit cards, since we share finances anyway.
Sometimes, we even buy it ourselves, wrap it, put it under the tree, and tell our spouse that we “took care of it.”
There have been times when my wife opened her Christmas present from me, and I was just as surprised as my children were when we saw it. I got you a new pair of running shoes. Nice.
In the past, I attempted to deviate from my wife’s official Christmas list. You know, to surprise her. I was trying to be romantic.
It rarely went over well, particularly if I attempted to get her clothes or perfume.
Just stick to the list, married guys. Perhaps it’s not as romantic, but it’s still the best option. If you want to deviate from the list, make sure you get everything on the list, too.
This year, my wife requested something that I had to purchase in a showroom and have delivered at a later date to the house. I facetimed with my wife while I was in the store, to make sure I was getting the exact one that she wanted. It’s being delivered on a day when she works from home. She’ll have to be there to receive it. And they say romance is dead…
Licking blocks of ice during the heat wave, NYC, (1912)
I was called to the 6th floor of a 6 floor tenement building for a “seriously unwell child”. A woman was waiting downstairs, and she said “I’m going out, but I think my son is dead. He’s had a cold for a week.” And she left.
I had the jump kit (a first aid kit) and my partner had the oxygen and suction- I went up the 12 set of stairs two at a time (oh, to be young and foolish again…) so I got there before he did. A man was there with 4 kids who all looked very scrubby but also very alive. He said “He’s on the sofa”. And then, they went back to eating.
The little boy was 4 or 5. He was so hot to the touch, and although he had a pulse, he wasn’t breathing. He was wearing red flannel cookie monster pajamas… I will never forget them.
I grabbed him in my arms, started mouth to mouth, and headed back down the stairs. The father actually said “Hey! Shut the door!”
I was busy. I met my partner halfway down. He took one look at the kid and said “Oh Fuck, we gotta get him out of here…”
I jumped in the back, but we were only 5 minutes from the hospital so I just kept him in my arms and did rescue breathing. I didn’t want to delay … my partner was there in less than 3 minutes. His heart was still pumping.
I brought the lad in, the staff took over. We were getting the truck ready when the doctor came out and said “which of you tech’d him?” I told him I did. (Tech-ing means you’re the one with the patient)
He said “You’re going to need a lice treatment.” I sighed.
He said “We can do it inside”. Now that was weird… but when I got inside, he said “I needed to talk to you privately… he died of bacterial meningitis. Did you do mouth to mouth?” Of course I had, he was a little kid. Bacterial Meningitis is spread through saliva and nasal secretions. I was (potentially) screwed.
So, they did blood work and I had to take evil antibiotics that turned everything yellow (INH and Rifampin) for a year. I was there for at the hospital for hours before I got sent home with a month off work to make sure I didn’t have bacterial meningitis too.
Now, I’ve driven way too fast, driven on roads that weren’t safe to walk on never mind drive, worked on cars while traffic buzzed past, turned over an ambulance (wasn’t my fault, honest), gone into burning buildings, gotten blood and lots of other “body stuff” on unprotected skin, walked into domestic violence situations, gone into freezing water to get some one else out, extricated people from a car on the edge of a ravine, been to a plane crash, extricated people from a burning car, talked people down who were holding guns to their own head- but all those times, I could see the risk in front of me. Had I taken the time to look at the kid’s rash, I might have seen the risk but his condition and the complete apathy of his parents drove me to not see the risk- and not assessing for the risk in what you’re doing is the single most dangerous thing anyone can do.
They were 5 minutes from the hospital, and no one cared enough to bring the kid there. Did I tell social services about the apathy of the parents? You can be sure I pursued the matter like a slightly yellow hell hound.
Well I was the uniform manager for a marching band and what we did worked fairly well. We kept an assortment of sizes on hand and when we got a new member, we had them try on those in stock uniforms until we found their best fit. Then we would place the order to replace the one they were issued from stock. There is a lot of variation in cuts of shirts, and one company’s medium might be another company’s large. If someone comes in who looks like a large and says “oh I’m a medium,” say “Here is one try it on; be aware these tend to run small so you may need to move up a size from what you usually wear.” The employee gets to save face, and you don’t have to be rude and say “Oh I can tell by looking at you a medium will never fit.” If I were ordering a large number of shirts, I would first order a selection of sizes for people to try on. Then launder those sample shirts and put them away to issue later to new employees as they come in. If these are something more fitted than a T-shirt or polo shirt and this were going to be a large order, it might be good to have a representative from the uniform or shirt shop to measure people and order one that best fit them.
An Ojibwe Native American spearfishing, Minnesota, (1908)
A few years ago our city decided to try to alleviate the homeless problem.
They bought a large two story motel that had become a bit rundown located along a major freeway.
They spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars fixing it up and remodeling every room into small studio apartments.
Then they let homeless people to live in the apartments.
We would drive by the apartments periodically and every time it looked more rundown.
This went on for a couple of years until one day it was burned to the ground. A news story said one of the homeless people decided to build a fire in one of the apartments. I guess he just like the look of a campfire.
Eventually, the building was demolished and the city sold the land at a significant loss.
Giving a house to every homeless person is not financially feasible. No government entity can afford that.
And, even if it was, it would not solve the homeless problem.
The only way to fix the homeless problem is to help a homeless person, who wants help, become stable and productive so they can eventually afford their own home.
Homelessness isn’t solved in mass. It’s solved one homeless person at a time.
Generalissimus Jiang Jieshi (蔣介石), also known with the Wade-Giles Romanization Chiang Kai-Shek.
Born 31 October 1887, he was a professional soldier and one of the most genuinely talented soldiers China has ever produced. His tragedy was to live in one of the most tragic eras of China ever, to encounter superior enemies, and having an army full of rotten and corrupt subordinates. He fought a hopeless war of which he had no hopes of winning, yet he did it with utmost courage.
The death of Sun Yat-Sen (Sun Yixian) in 1925 had left China in a power vacuum and interregnum, and the land collapsed into anarchy known as Era of Warlords. China became a Warlordistan. The control of the country was divided among former military cliques of the Beiyang Army and other regional factions from 1916 to 1928.
Chiang raised the National Chinese Army, allied with the Communists led by Mao Zedong, and crushed the warlords, unifying the country. And alas, the Communists proved an unreliable ally – and the Empire beyond the sea, even more unreliable. Japan attacked China in 1931 after the Mukden incident.
The Japanese army was superior in technology, fighting spirit (dao), discipline and logistics. The Guomindang army of Chiang suffered from poor equipment, corruption, lack of patriotism and poor logistics – it was an “army of lions led by jackasses”, but its commander was the alpha lion.
Way too little has been written about the China-Japan war 1931–1941 and China’s part in the World War Two. But China has been one of the main theatres – and one of the main sufferers – in the war, and the Japanese praised the Chinese soldiers, insisting them be second only to the Australians in their will to fight.
Meanwhile Mao Zedong conspired to overthrow Guomindang (or Kuomintang, if you prefer the Wade-Giles Romanization), and after the liberation of China, the civil war re-emerged. The Guomindang army was tired, consumed and exhausted, while Stalin eagerly supported the Communists, finally overcoming the Guomindang 1949. Chiang and the Nationalist refugees fled to Taiwan.
The Communist Chinese propaganda has done all it could to stample Chiang as an unpatriotic American stooge and a traitor, while the Guomindang in Taiwan set up a Western-style state under Christian and Confucian principles.
But nobody could deny Chiang was a true Chinese patriot. His last will was that his body be buried in his hometown Fenghua.
Loyal Husband Finds Out Wife Participates In “Events” While He’s Away Working (She’s Toast!)
When I got into IT I got in the habit of showing up early to prepare for my day. I spent a lot of time traveling to various facilities as a computer support tech so I’d come in to check email and make sure there wasn’t something I needed to do in the office before loading up and hitting the road.
Many of my younger coworkers would clock in on the hour but our business manager, who didn’t clock in, had a bad habit of showing up 15 minutes late each day. (She also had a tendency to leave 5 or10 minutes early, but that’s another story for another time.) One week the IT Director and our boss, the Deputy IT Director, were both out of town so the business manager decided that she could show up whenever she felt like it.
She was at least a half hour late on Monday through Thursday, including 45 minutes late on Wednesday, so when she showed up at 8:15 on Friday morning I exclaimed, “Gee, Linda, this is the earliest you’ve been late all week!”. Everyone got a laugh out of it but Linda, apparently, didn’t think it was funny because she called my boss at the seminar that she was attending to complain.
The next thing I know my boss is calling me and asking what I said to set Linda off. So I told her what had been going on all week. She told me that Linda was offended by my comment and asked if I’d be willing to apologize, and I just laughed and laughed and laughed. Then I said, “No.”
If Linda had told me to eff off, or kiss her butt, or just about anything else I would have taken it in stride but her calling the boss, when she was in the wrong, pissed me off. I’d asked your coworker if he/she signs your paycheck and when they answer in the negative, tell them when you come in is none of their business. But I can understand where they’re coming from, especially if you have a problem getting to work on time.
Jewish women and children arriving at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, Poland, (1944)
This is going to be fun. But let me tell you, its more like what I thought she was like and how she actually is…
When we first met through parents, she looked like a shy girl next door. She was smiling and feeling awkward a lot. After we got married and a little more comfortable, she walks around house naked, has 0 level of shyness.
I thought I was getting cold feet. She was being forced. Turned out she had insisted to her parents that she wanted to get married, like literally told them in a complete sentence, ‘Dad, I want to get married. I don’t have any boyfriend right now. Search a groom for me.’ I’m not even exaggerating, her parents tell this story all the time.
I thought she didn’t like talking. WRONG. She NEVER shuts up. If she does, I’ll wake up. Lol, I’ve started to enjoy it.
She’s frigid. WRONG. Once comfortable, she’s a freak.
She’s so slow and, unhappy person. Wrong. She is hyperactive and becomes happy just about at nothing.
She doesn’t like me. Big time wrong. Turned out, she has liked me since day 1. She loves me.
She’ll probably never fight or argue. Wrong. Loveeess to argue, though I don’t like to admit it much, she’s usually right about things. And people too.
Is probably passive aggressive. Wrong. Tells me when things bother her, almost immediately.
Is dumb. Wrong. She’s really smart.
She does not feel much. Wrong. All of her emotions are intense.
Is very serious. Wrong. Very very wrong. Can’t go on a day without lame jokes. Lame jokes are lifeline to her. She knows they are lame but loves it.
As for the changes, she hasn’t changed much. Can motherhood be included? Anyways, it suits her well.
She’s staying at her parents place with our boy. I miss her. Its been just a day though. I guess, I’ll call now.
Unusual Abandoned Cat Came Into Shelter And Amazed People With Its Size
My Mom…
My Mom once told me that she walked into a room where a couple of friends were discussing her, they didn’t know she was there. She shook her head, smiled and walked away. 🕊
My Mom also told me that she had a friend who talked bad about her, she never knew that Mom found out, Mom never mentioned it. She smiled and walked away from this friendship. 🕊
She told me she had family who chose to shift her out of their life because she stood up for herself for a change. And because she stopped crossing oceans for them when they would not even help her cross a bridge. She smiled, shook her head and walked away. 🕊
So I asked her how she could just walk away from people that betrayed her while pretending to be her friends or family? 🕊
She answered that every time she came to a crossroad like that, she had to decide who will be going forward on her journey with her. This showed her who she cannot take along with her. 🕊
So she explained to me that you should never get mad at a person who betrays you, even in the name of friendship or family. Just gracefully bow out and enjoy your journey with all the new people God puts in their place. 🕊
10 years ago I was an IT consultant, traveling every week. I would also always book a Marriott hotel if one was close to the customer, all paid for on my American Express card.
Marriott awards you points for your stays with them. Once I had at least 100, 000 points I’d call them and request gift certificates. 100, 000 points would give you $1,000 worth of gift certs to pay for your hotel.
Back then, at the end of your stay, someone would come around in the middle of the night and slide the invoice for your stay that week. That invoice would show they charged my AmEx card for whatever the cost was.
Now that invoice was completely processed then. While it says it charged my card, they actually didn’t really do that until the afternoon after you checked out.
So what I would do is I’d go to the front desk with my invoice and my gift certs and tell the clerk that I would rather pay for my stay with the certs rather than my card. Then they’d issue me a new invoice showing I paid in certs. However I still had the original invoice. That would be the invoice I’d submit in my expenses. So every couple of months I’d be reimbursed $1000 so I could pay my cc bill, but since I actually paid in certs that 1000 bucks was essentially free money I’d drop into my savings. I and every one else I knew did it all the time, it was really an awesome little loophole
Beef Steak and Kidney Pie
Ingredients
Filling
3/4 pound calf kidney or beef liver
Salted water
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
3/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 pounds beef steak, cut into bite-size pieces
4 tablespoons butter
4 shallots, finely chopped
1 cup beef bouillon
1 bay leaf
1 teaspoon chopped fresh parsley
Pinch of ground cloves
Pinch of marjoram, crushed
1/2 pound fresh mushrooms, sliced and sautéed
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
Pastry Topping
1/3 cup plus 1 tablespoon shortening
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 to 3 tablespoons cold water
Instructions
Filling: Clean and split kidney; remove fat and large tubes. Soak in salted water 1 hour.
Dry and cut into 1/4-inch slices. Mix flour, salt and pepper; roll kidney and beef pieces in flour mixture.
Melt butter in heavy pot and sauté shallots. When shallots have taken on a little color, add beef and kidney; brown lightly, turning.
Add bouillon, bay leaf, parsley, cloves and marjoram. Stir; cover and simmer 1 to 1 1/4 hours, or until meat is tender.
Add mushrooms and Worcestershire sauce. If liquid is too thin, thicken with smooth paste of flour and cold water.
Grease a deep 10-inch baking dish. Place pie funnel in center. Add meat mixture and allow to cool in refrigerator.
Meanwhile, prepare Pastry Topping. Place pastry over meat, sealing pastry edges to edge of dish. Make vents in pastry to allow steam to escape.
Bake at 450 degrees F for 8 to 10 minutes; lower heat to 375 degrees F and continue baking 15 minutes, or until crust is golden.
Pastry Topping: Cut shortening into flour and salt until particles are size of small peas.
Sprinkle in water, 1 tablespoon at a time, tossing with fork until all flour is moistened and pastry almost cleans sides of bowl, adding 1 to 2 teaspoons water if necessary.
Gather pastry into a ball; shape into flattened round on lightly floured cloth-covered board. Roll out to fit top of casserole.
My best friend had a defective heart. I don’t know the exact term for that, but her heart was on the right side of her chest among several other defects. She couldn’t walk farther than 200m, and her finger tips would always turn black.
When she was born, the doctor gave her a life expectancy of 2 years. She surpassed that. Her parents took her to all the best hospitals in the country. Another estimation: 10 years old. She surpassed that too. She completed high school, she got into college. And she always was a cheerful girl to be with. (Sometimes, her mother kicked my ass out of the house because when we hung out, we laughed too much. Laughing would consume oxygen from her heart and her brain so she would suffer from headaches afterward).
One day, when she was at the university, her heart collapsed. Her doctor demanded her to drop college because it was too much for her. She came back to our hometown, and became an at-home teacher for the kids, and still was a cheerful girl.
After that another year, her heart collapsed once again. She was hospitalized. Her doctor informed her parents that there was nothing more they could do. Her family should consider to unplug the machines and bring her home.
Her mother called me. She said “We are bring [my friend’s name] home”. I rushed into the hospital. Her mother was on one side of her bed holding her left hand, I was on the other side holding her right hand when they unplugged her.
That moment, her mother collapsed to the ground and screamed: “I’ve lost her! From now on, I don’t have anyone to take care of anymore!”
At that moment, I know that just being born normally to be able to live a normal life is extremely lucky. Also, having someone you love by your side, even that means you have to take care of them all the time is also lucky.
Well, not the above but the other way around. In 2014 we were looking to buy a replacement for my wife’s car, and were at the Skoda garage checking out a very-nearly-new Fabia. It had been the showroom’s demonstrator model for a few months, had just a couple of hundred miles on it, but the salespeople had been showing that vehicle to people day in, day out.
We looked in the boot. My wife’s a bee-keeper and a “must have” for her was to be able to get a bee-hive in the back. To do that meant taking the rear parcels shelf off, which I did myself to see how easy it was to do and to replace, since this would be a common action. Putting it back, I noticed you could put it back either in the “conventional” position, or in a half-way house lower position. “Hey, “ I said. “That’s a nifty feature – allows you to put larger items on the parcel shelf but still have it hiding stuff underneath.” At that the salesperson looked in, looked at the shelf, the boot, then went over to his colleague and said “Come over here. We’ve found a brand-new feature!”
We bought the car, still got it now. Don’t think we’ve ever used the parcel shelf in “half-way” position.
My father had been terminally ill for a decade. He was a perfectionist in everything in his life and no detail was ever missed. He was also very stubborn. If there were ever odds almost insurmountable, he always prevailed. This was part of why he’d been terminal for so very long.
One day before, my father agreed that it was time to bring hospice in and make final arrangements. My parents had two other daughters, I was the only one who lived in the same town. Because of my location, he wanted me to be at those meetings.
I was working in the executive offices for a local bank. The woman I reported to was exacting in everything and expected perfection to be performed with minimal preparation and no clarifications. She wanted a mind reader who loved emergencies and placed her on a pedestal.
After that phone call, I was shaken up. It wasn’t unexpected, but you are never really prepared for the situation when you are facing it.
“Something has come up. It’s a delicate family matter,” I said.
“That’s just not convenient,” she said. “Even if it’s life or death, it’s not convenient. I have a series of reports that are due today.” This was news to me. “And I’m expecting that you will be here long after hours.”
“It actually is life or death,” I said. I was about to elaborate when she cut me off.
“Is it your life or death?”
“Honestly, no.”
“Then it’s not convenient.”
“I’m afraid that poor planning on your part really isn’t my problem.”
“Excuse me?” she asked.
“No excuse for you and your lack of planning. I’m quitting as of,” I looked at my watch, “about two minutes from now. Just long enough to get my purse and log off the computer.”
“You can’t do that,” she said.
“Can and did.”
I grabbed my purse and left the building.
I replaced the job with a much nicer one in about two days.
My father passed less than two weeks from my exit. The new job, and I only worked it for two days when he died, not only let me have the time off to complete his arrangements and his funeral, sent flowers. One week later, HR from the bank called, offered me a raise and an apology. “I’m sorry. That’s just not convenient.”
I once attended a court case to support a friend. Her sister was accused by a nasty neighbour of breaking into the nasty neighbour’s home, stealing items, and trying to assault her (on more than one occasion).
My friend and her sister were both black women. It was no secret that the neighbour was this old racist woman who routinely called the police on the sister and her boyfriend when they were minding their own business. When the woman invited her sister (my friend), and her kids to come to visit and swim in their pool, also to use the tennis courts and fitness room that was shared by the condo complex. The boyfriend was also black.
When called to testify the nasty neighbour gave detailed dates about the break in and mentioned her “fox fur coat, some diamond jewellery and several hams and frozen meat”, being taken from her home. She swore that she came home to see the women and her boyfriend running out the back door at night with the merchandise in a leather suitcase.
When the lawyer for the woman questioned the woman and her boyfriend, who each took turns on the stand, it was proven that the neighbour lied by showing that:
My friend’s sister, who worked as a passenger flight attendant, was working on a flight that was on its way to Singapore during the very night and time when she was supposed to have broken into the neighbour’s home. (It’s hard to break into a home when you’re two hours into a 12 hour flight that is 39,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean.)
She and her boyfriend were also vegetarians who never ate meat nor wore nor owned leather and fur since they both believed that “meat is murder”, and to wear animal furs and leather was “cruel and inhumane”.
The boyfriend was also on his way to Singapore flying from India the afternoon before, to meet up with his girlfriend after a business trip for three day vacation, before they’d fly back to Canada. He proposed marriage while they visited Singapore (she said “yes” and did marry him). So they were in Singapore the day before “the break in” at the neighbour’s home and they didn’t return until three days later.
The lawyer for my friend’s sister and her boyfriend also presented pictures of the very “stolen” items in question taken by the police when they were recovered from pawn shops and a consignment store. The items were pawned by a young white man, a known drug addict with a lengthy arrest record who happened to be the neighbour’s nephew whom the neighbour gave money to on a regular basis (not helping him at all).
Before the judge dismissed all charges he ordered the neighbour to be taken into custody for “fraud, perjury, aiding and abetting a criminal” and a few other charges.
In the end the neighbour lost her house and all her savings when my friend’s sister and her boyfriend sued the neighbour for slander and defamation of character. They won a large sum in court and the neighbour ended up spending four years in prison for additional charges which included drug possession on top of what she was already convicted of.
I guess nasty racist people get what’s coming to them after all.
College students pile into a Volkswagen Beetle, (c. 1965)
For those that do it full time, very tough. They have to stand up in front of the crowd and make them laugh. Do you realize what it takes to do that? Then there is the travelling and eating crap food and nerves. For those starting out it is not easy at all. For those on top, well, they have to keep coming up with acts to stay on top. As I did both, a standup comedian and professional drummer in a band, playing in a band was far easier. Below is a little of my stand up act.
I was a part time stand up comedian for awhile along with being a professional drummer. I auditioned for a few shows in local comedy clubs. They must have liked me, I got jobs. I was usually the start off guy, first one out. I had my own shtick. The guy who showed up at the wrong event.
I’d walk out then somberly say, “ I realize this is a sad time for most of you, but Mary, bless her soul loved humour.” Then I’d look behind me and kind of look around confused, then I’d turn to the audience. “Um, Mary’s passing surprised many, especially Mary. I think she’d like some humour at her funeral. She often said that “to laugh at something heartily means that you think it’s funny,” and I heartily agree. I always thought Mary was a deep thinker and that proves it right?
“She was 81, poor Mary. Actually, a woman’s life expectancy is 80, so hey, good for her. Now a man’s life expectancy is 76. If I make it to 76, I’m going to have a sex change. Right? I’ll beat those odds. So I hope to add a bit of humour to Mary’s funeral, wherever she is,” and I look around again for Mary.
Suddenly a sharp whistle from the stage side. I’d stop and walk over with my mic.
“This is not a funeral home. This is a comedy club,” the stage manager would tell me so the audience would hear.
“What? This isn’t Roses Funeral Parlour?” I would say surprised. The crowd would start laughing.
“Do you see Mary anywhere?” he’d ask.
“Actually no,” I would say looking around. “How much do you pay here?”
“$250.” he’d tell me.
A few seconds of silence then I’d say, “Sure, what the hell, Mary won’t miss me,” then I’d walk back center stage where people would be giggling.
“Okay, who here had a good shit today?” Well the crowd would laugh. Somebody always raised a hand, I’d try to pick a girl.
“You did, great, good for you. I won’t ask you details okay?” The girl would laugh.
“So do you know there are many types of shits? There’s the peanut butter shit; that’s the one where you can use up to three rolls of toilet paper, the upside down volcano shit, the totally air shit which isn’t even really a shit though it felt like it was going to be one,,” the shart which is a shit that felt like air but wasn’t, the bombing raid shit and the ghost shit.” Then I’d stop and go back to the girl.
“Okay, I was just wondering what came out that made it such a good shit? We all want to know don’t we folks?” I’d say looking around and people would start applauding. Of course the girl would laugh and hide her face in her hands. “Okay forget it. Tell me privately later. People, I’m going to tell you what the best shit of all is. It’s the Ghost Shit!”
“This is the one when you have to go so bad and there’s no restroom around. It’s turtling so bad it’s stretching your underwear. Suddenly, by some miracle, you find a restroom. You fly in there and sit on the toilet after near ripping your pants off. And ….. it starts.”
“Like the RMS Titanic, this thing is moving out with no effort and it seems like it’s going forever. You are wondering how this thing is going to go down that little toilet hole. It’s embarrassing if you are at someone’s house and you come out of the bathroom and ask, “Hey, have you got a plunger? A good one? One with a lot of suction?” You always get a strange look when you ask that don’t you?
Anyway, so the Titanic has left the dock and you are feeling suddenly very hollow inside, and relieved. You grab some toilet paper and wipe. Nothing! Not a speck of shit on your ass. Puzzled, you stand up and look at the toilet. It’s looking back at you innocent as hell. THERE IS NOTHING IN THE TOILET! What the hell? You look around; nope, not on the floor! It’s nowhere but you felt it by God! That ladies and gentlemen is the Ghost Shit, or maybe I should have called it the Houdini Shit.
Crude yes but it got me back to the comedy clubs. People loved me talking about shit because they all go through it every day.
I used to be hired to give speeches at weddings. Just before the actual person would rise to give a toast to the bride, I would jump up and interrupt him.
“Thank you, thank you. Ah, the lovely bride. Leona, you’re looking great.” That was never the brides name. I’d make one up and the people would laugh. I did the same skit to friends of my sisters who were getting married.
“So, a toast to the bride huh? I’m supposed to come up with some funny stories about her, and some heart warming ones.” Silence from me for a few seconds as the people would snicker. “I have nothing,” I would say, “but I do have a few, should we say naughty stories of Leona. And I promise I will say nothing of that disease you had a few months ago,” I’d say looking at her and pretend I was zippering my mouth.
That would be the cue for someone to say, “That’s not Leona, that’s Shirley!”
I would look up surprised, then look around.
“This isn’t the Wright Patterson wedding?” I would ask. Yes, I know, that’s an air base. I’d be told no it isn’t.
“Jesus,” I would say, “Um, were you going to say something?” I’d say to the guy who originally was going to give the toast to the bride, and I’d run out.
I had fun doing them and I had a few different ones so I’d change them around. I wrote my own material. You can tell? That’s good.
When I started to get quite busy in my pro drumming career I left the comedian stage. I missed the laughs. But I’d do them at get togethers at friends houses and parties.
Being a comedian is a nerve wracking but fun gig. Loved the laughs.
Cab stand in Madison Square Park, New York, (ca 1900)
When I was doing my graduation, I stayed in a hostel, which provided lunch and dinner but no breakfast. You had two options for breakfast: Go out to a restaurant nearby and have a hot breakfast or eat what most of the students ate – mashed banana and flattened rice (it is called poha or chura in India). I chose the second option since the first option was too costly. The food in the hostel was neither good in quality nor enough in quantity. So most of the times, I was famished.
I used to pity myself till I had a discussion about hunger with one of my classmates. He was worse off than me. His father was dead and his mother used to serve tea and water in a government office in a desolate tribal village. In short, he had enough money to have just one meal a day. I asked him what he did when he felt hungry. He said he would drink water.
This classmate of mine was a good student but did not have a clue about what to do after his graduation. In those days, IT was booming in India and I convinced him to do get a Masters degree in Computer Applications (MCA). He got into one of the best Universities of India.
I did not meet him when we were doing our Post Graduation since I was at a different University. I met him a year after both of us had started our careers. He came to meet me. He was working for the largest software company of India and was on his way to his first foreign assignment. I felt very happy at how he had been able to turn around his fortune. He had started from a village which did not have electricity and his relatives and friends had not even seen life outside their village.
I am not in touch with him. But I searched the net and I found this photo. He is happily settled with his family in the USA.
So how do you deal with being too poor? Work hard and have patience. Things will turn around.
Unemployed men outside Al Capone’s soup kitchen in Chicago during the Great Depression, (1931)
Is earth round? Does waves rush to the shores?, Do the sun rise in the east?
Let me see, the US has a doctrine, it’s call Monroe Doctrine. It says no power big and small cannot come near North America and when USSR wanted to arm Cuba nuclear missile, the U.S. threaten to start a nuclear war! And duly blockade and sanction Cuba for 62 years straight! Is that hegemonic?
The U.S. has invaded 68 nations and counting since its nation is formed after doing genocide on its inhabitants and rightful owner the native Indians. Is that hegemonic?
It has cause millions upon millions of deaths due to regime change, coup orchestration by the U.S. it send out millions of CIA and NED officials around the world to destabilise nations so that they can set up puppet and sham governments to act on U.S. behalf and for US interest! Are these actions hegemonic.
Are all these actions that in total caused up to 100 million deaths, hegemonic? Or according to your media it is doing Mother Teresa role!
In my second year of university, I was summoned to a police station without knowing why. My father drove me and had to wait outside the office while I was being questioned.
The reason why I was summoned was quite a surprise.
Together with a good friend and a girl I was seeing at the time, I had smoked some weed and drank a couple of beers, and much later that night my friend had been robbed by a couple of low-lifes. So he called the police and explained his predicament.
The problem was: (1) my friend was drunk at the time; (2) round about that time my friend was starting to show the first signs of the paranoid schizophrenia that would later ruin his life.
So my friend told the police a story that did not make sense, and after a couple of questions, the story had gotten even worse: he claimed that before he was robbed, he had taken hard drugs together with the girl and me, and that the girl was actually a drug dealer. But he had forgotten the girl’s name.
Not mine, of course.
So instead of focusing on the robbery, the police men focused on the “hard drugs” and the “drug dealer.” And I was the one who would tell them the girl’s name. Which I didn’t.
After a lot of repeated questions and repeated threats — in which they refused to acknowledge the mental condition of my friend — they called in my dad, and explained to him that I blatantly refused to give them the girl’s name. To which my father said:
“This is ABSOLUTELY the right thing to do, and I am VERY proud of him. I would do the EXACT same thing.”
The police men did not know what to say, and not much later I was released after paying a ridiculous fine. When we left the office, they kept staring at my dad, a grey-bearded man with fierce eyes and thundering charisma.
Lightning had struck.
And the hammer had spoken.
SOURCES: the first drawing is taken from the book Nordiska Gudar by Johan Egerkrans; the second image us my own.
World War II propaganda posters in Port Washington, New York, (1942)
Focus on giving key people you work with what they want. At the end of the day, all people want to hear is “i’m going to fix your problems”.
Trust your intuition. People will try and fill your day with shit that doesn’t matter, do what YOU know does matter.
Make some friends, even if just to keep your sanity.
Don’t participate in shit talking. If a co-worker decides you are their confidant, just nod along with them—but never engage directly in the shit talking. You’ll save your own reputation and as a bonus you won’t feel shitty about yourself.
Say NO more. people respect people that can say no and don’t rollover for everything. Saying YES to everything just leaves you running on an endless treadmill.
Under-promise, over-deliver. always.
Make every effort not to give concrete deadlines, because you won’t be able to meet them anyway. Your credibility will falter. Unfortunately you’ll probably have to give them at some point.
Don’t try and be the best. Instead, make friends with people in a position of power and be at least competent.
Learn empathy. In reality, people don’t really care what gets done if you make them feel important and like they are achieving things. People just want to be heard, man.
A lot of these suck to admit….but it’s the way things are. Whether that’s because of some bullshit implicit social contracts or just the way we’re wired….its what corporate life is really like.
I had what seemed like the ideal bachelor life. Oh, and terror of getting trapped in marriage.
I mean, I was living the dream in college.
Living in a fraternity house with my buds.
Cute girls constantly around.
Parties every weekend.
More alcohol than common sense.
My parents paid for my college expenses. I worked every summer to make money for my personal expenses. So when school started I could focus on it and having fun.
Like I said I was living the dream.
But a weird thing happened. As I faced graduation the fun had worn thin.
I was tired of being hurt in relationships and hurting others.
I hoped there was more to life than one continual party.
I longed to share life at a deeper level with someone.
And I knew I needed to stop drinking so damn much.
Shortly before graduation two things happened that changed my life.
I went through a spiritual experience that transformed me.
And I met the most beautiful girl I’d ever know. Unfortunately, she had zero interest in getting to know me.
We eventually started dating. My persistence won out. And a year later married.
I look back over my life and think of all the blessings of marriage I’d have missed as a bachelor.
Someone to love and who loves me. Even sometimes when I’m, shall we say, less than lovable.
Sharing life together. The good, the bad and the ugly. And most of all the beautiful.
Raising our children that filled our lives with occasional frustration and even more love.
Conquering life together. Strengths making up for weaknesses. And glad she didn’t keep score.
Caring for each other in sickness and enjoying each other in health.
Laughing, crying, rejoicing and celebrating.
And at night, when I drift off to sleep, holding her hand and feeling a contentment I simply never could have imagined.
So for some, singleness works.
For me I can’t imagine having missed marrying my wife. And for her? I think she feels the same. At least on most days.
You’ll find a depth of life in marriage you cannot experience outside of it.
My house has a two person jacuzzi tub with mirrors on three walls around it. When I was looking at the house there was a four post canopy bed with a mirror inside the canopy. Needless to say, the previous owner had his thing.
When I was moving in I found in the basement a bar with cuffs on either end hanging from the ceiling and two eye bolts in a board on the floor that would have made this a perfect place to tie someone up spread eagle. I strongly suspect that is what it was used for.
I have a room that used to be a bar (previous owner took the bar itself with him despite it being a built in). It has a dropped ceiling and the lights are above with clear panels to let the light thru. I was moving ceiling tiles to change a bulb and got hit in the face by what I’m guessing was a home made sex swing that was bolted to the rafters above.
I’ve been in this house 3 years and I still occasionally find a secret panel in a wall. It seems anywhere there was an extra bit of space he put a removable panel to make a hidden storage space.
And despite all that, the single most surprising thing I found in this house is the light switch in the bathroom that has power going to it but doesn’t seem to actually switch anything in the house! What do you do about a mysterious switch?
We also found a stack of acrylic paintings in the basement, all very amateurish. Subjects ranged from creepy little girls to 70’s psychedelic nude ladies. Realtor told the owners to pick them up, or they would end up in the trash. They showed up a year later asking for them
Bonus, junk removal guy loved the 70’s nudes, asked to keep them.
It has nothing to do with “authoritarian government” it has everything to do with China not playing by U.S. “rules” that requires China to be submissive and subservient to the U.S. if you are observant you will noticed that the nations that the U.S. and the west have been giving negative press are all nations that refused to be submissive and subservient to the west.
The west merely represent 13% of the world? In fact the west is controlled by the the U.S. which represents 4% of the world. Should the 96% or the 87% of the rest of the world kowtow and let the west walk all over them? And dictate what they do? Who they make friends with? What they buy, how much they ought to pay? What religion they believe or what cloths to wear or what food they eat?
Let me give you an American answer! Over our dead body! It ain’t gonna happen!
The Global South is drifting away as we speak. No nations will buys your shit anymore. We decide our own fate. China certainly won’t. But so is 175 out of the 195 nations on earth. The faster you westerners get this, the better it is for you. Stop thinking about decoupling or de-risking China, the world is decoupling and de-risking from the U.S. and the west!
Your media and your government can lie and fabricate all you want but the bus has left the station. Authoritarian or CCP or communist or dictator are all excuses not reason for hating China and Chinese. These are narratives for the simple mind. It is demonising because it can’t get its way. Like a toddler throwing tantrum, that is what it is. Frankly if you are a westerner, your government is trying to hoodwink you! Not U.S. because we are not fools. We know lies when we see it.
Sidewheeler Tashmoo leaving wharf in Detroit, (ca 1901)
When I was younger, I was the Assisstant Manager of a Pizza Hut. I was moved to this particular store with the expectation that the Store Manager who was there had set me up to become the next Store Manager. When he resigned I was passed over for a 23 year old nobody with no experience or work ethic. He worked 25 hours a week and had me do most of his duties on top of my own. He would often show up in the middle of dinner rush with his posse, ask how things were, I would tell him it was terrible and we needed help, he’d see that we did, and say things like “Sounds good” and walk out.
Week after week people in my Store were getting overworked and burned out. I constantly hounded my Area Manager to let me hire people, often being turned down. He woul even turn down temporarily allowing neighboring stores to send their workers to my Store to keep up with demand. So week after week we would have at least 1 person quit.
Even when I was allowed to hire ONE person, that person would freak out on day one because of the workload pushed upon all of us. They would typically last 1 day, maybe a week, before quitting.
One day we were told we were having a store meeting with the Area Manager so I typed up my resignation letter preemptively and attended. We were told how terrible our customer service scores were (mostly hold time issues or delivery time issues because we couldn’t keep enough people to staff the whole store, so delivery drivers were cutting and boxing pizzas, answering phones and taking orders, THEN delivering them) and how we needed to shape up. I spoke up and said we desperately needed more employees and I was waved off again. So I finished my shift that night, put my resignation letter in the fax machine with my end of day paperwork, locked the door, and dropped my security key and door keys in the mail slot. The next day I was inundated with phone calls from the Store Manager and Area Manager, which I ignored for a few hours. Then I picked up, the Area Manager begged me to come back and said he’d do anything if I came back.
“A raise?”
“Sure, whatever you need.”
“4 more employees?”
“No, you know you’re not getting that.”
*hangup*
I never talked to them again.
Titanic sinks on April 15, 1912. Newspaper boy Ned Parfett sells copies of the evening paper bearing news of the disaster.
As a car mechanic, what is the craziest discovery you have found on an automobile?
I’m not the mechanic, but I know of one crazy discovery. My father purchased a brand new GMC Suburban in the 1980s and gave me his old pickup truck so I would have a vehicle while attending college. He occasionally heard a strange knocking noise while driving that Suburban, but neither he nor the dealer could ever figure out what was causing it. Since he didn’t hear that noise very often, and the vehicle ran great, he just kept driving it and eventually simply ignored that occasional knocking noise. The transmission needed to be rebuilt when it was 9 years old, so he took the Suburban to a shop that pulled the transmission and rebuilt it. While reinstalling it, the mechanic spotted a small hand-held air impact wrench hanging from a bent welding rod between the engine and firewall. He called my father, who then went back to the shop and took photos of the impact wrench and welding rod before and after they were removed. The wrench had “Property of GM” engraved on it.
Since it appeared the impact wrench had been hung there while on the assembly line, my father took the photos, impact wrench, and bent welding rod to the dealer who had sold it. The dealer wanted to send everything to GM, but my father would only agree to let him send copies of the photos. A GM lawyer called him the following week and offered to pay $500 for the return the impact wrench and welding rod, provide and release all prints and negatives he had taken of them to GM, and for his wife and him to sign a non-disclosure agreement concerning any and all possible “manufacturing flaws” involving that Suburban. My father made a counter offer of $5000. The lawyer said the most he was authorized to offer would be a $3000 manufacturer’s credit towards the purchase of a new GM vehicle. My father countered again by asking for both the $500 and $3000 credit towards a new GM vehicle. The lawyer agreed and then arraigned to have the dealer handle the exchange and witness my parents signing a non-disclosure agreement. My parents then negotiated with the dealer to buy a new car for my mother, and then applied that $500 check and the $3000 manufacturer’s credit towards the purchase of it.
After that impact wrench was removed, my father never heard that knocking noise again. Since I knew about this “manufacturing flaw” before they signed that non-disclosure agreement, I’m not bound by it. But my surviving parent could be subject to significant financial penalties for discussing this story, so I am posting this anonymously to prevent any possible repercussions. However I seriously doubt GM would want to have people going through records more than three decades old just to determine who my parents are.
I’ve told this story elsewhere but it fits here as well.
In a prior life I worked for a major multi-national and the division I worked in was managed by somebody based in Europe (let’s call him George). But he had direct reports in a number of cities around the world including New York. So during one of his visits to New York he speaks to Fred and tells him that things just aren’t working out so he should find another job. Nothing out of the ordinary and not adversarial in any way.
So about a year later George is in New York and sees Fred sitting in his office wearing jeans and track shoes, feet up on his desk reading a newspaper. So he says “Fred, why are you still here? Didn’t I tell you to find another job?” And Fred’s response was classic “Yes but my contract requires one year’s written notice and I’ve never received anything.”
To make a long story short, George was off to HR and after a discussion with legal Fred got a year’s salary plus the cash value of all the benefits he would have rec’d during the year. Given how senior Fred was I’m sure that check would have been at least $400 K (and more likely quite a bit north of that).
So way back in 1984 I worked a summer in Yellowstone national park. During training I learned a lot about dangers in the park. For example, bison kill many more people than grizzly bears. That being said at least one person a year is kill in the park by a grizzly bear.
But I digress.
The dumbest question that a tourist asked me was a question that they warned me I would be asked and I laughed like it was a joke. They seriously said no you will get asking this and please don’t embarrass the tourists who ask it.
So a couple days into the Job I am standing there and this nice looking middle aged American woman who seemed she had all her senses came up to me and looked me straight in the face and asked,
“Where do they put the animals at night”?
I was gobsmacked!
This woman actually thought that all the animals were gathered up at night and put in cages. Just like I was warned, someone asked me the question I thought I would never hear.
And no, she most certainly wasn’t the last tourist to ask me that!
My two week notice was a long time coming. I was sick of working in finance, at that company, and for that boss. I slept terribly the night before, having fevered dreams of a squandered future. But I knew I needed some upheaval. I was forging a sad, bitter storyline that would haunt me forever.
As I embarked on my new journey as a writer, I unpacked my new life, and all the stories from that dark chapter, all the moments of pain and frustration, came with me. As with many of you, these scenes replay more vividly on my lesser days. It’s as the incomparable Frederick Nietzsche wrote, “When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”
Old embarrassments — losing my temper with someone 20 years ago, making ill advised comments, and moments of rejection — come bubbling up for no reason. Why could I see these scenes so easily and with 8K clarity while the amazing moments hid in the shadows?
Per Dr. Daniel L. Schacter, we remember the past so vividly because it’s a means of envisioning the future. We use it as a modeling tool, a form of mental time travel, where our mind anchors moments in time. The word “anchor” is key — because many of these images and stories become crystallized and of cognitive convenience.
For example, you might experience something I do when reading books: anytime there is a scene with a bar, I can’t help but see the same bar in my mind — to the point of it being annoying. If there’s some type of battle scene, I always see an old field I played in as a kid. This is the mind anchoring and why it’s so easy to recall the same negative moments over and over.
Per research by psychologist, Dr. Linda Levine, we tend to interpret past events through an emotional filter of the present. The same facts on paper suddenly look different. Negative moods — such as being tired, annoyed, or frustrated — evoke specific and detailed bad memories that often hit harder. Good moods — such as being well rested, jovial, excited, or in good humor — tend to evoke broader and more general memories. Unfortunately, negative memories are much more powerful and easily evoked.
We tend to apply a filter of our self-concept — who we’d like to be, and what our “ideal self” is and how we’d hoped to be perceived. Which is why our subconscious searches for contradictions to this ideal self.
For example, I’m generally a pleasant and nice person. Which is perhaps why my mind dredges up instances of me being unpleasant. I hate thinking of those times because when I do, I feel like I’m standing right there in that same room 15 years ago, watching my former self act out and be nasty with someone I loved.
The mind tells me, “Remember this person? You could be this person again if you don’t behave.” So how to we rewire this toxic pattern?
Rewriting your narrative
A few years ago, I thought, “Why am I beating myself up all the time?” I had so much to be thankful for. I’d brought plenty of good into this world, been a good friend and family member. I’d fought hard to win a better future but still bludgeoned myself over bygones that nobody else remembered.
I met with a therapist a few years ago and had tremendous improvement in dealing with negativity. He was a silver haired man, with black rimmed glasses and a quiet, friendly demeanor, and a PhD hanging on his wall.
As we began talking, he nodded his head in understanding and began giving me homework assignments anchored in cognitive behavioral therapy which, per the American Psychological Association, is as effective (or more) than other forms of psychotherapy and medications in dealing with negativity.
He said, “We often tell our life story to ourselves in excessively harsh terms, and jump to instant conclusions at our own expense.”
One exercise he gave was to practice reframing the stories with less certainty. Instead of saying X results in Y, explore alternative causes and remove unhelpful thoughts.
For example, during college, I was dumped by woman I was totally in love with. I deserved it. I was being irresponsible and drinking all the time and she finally had enough. For years, I was sure that my poor decisions had cost me my soulmate. But I learned this was totally unfair thinking.
Perhaps it wasn’t meant to be. Perhaps she was just losing interest and this was her way out. And if I’d stayed with her, I’d have never met the incredible woman I now have. Even more so, the concept of a soulmate felt a wee bit irrational and limiting.
When you map out events, and deconstruct the narrative you tell yourself, it can look entirely silly sometimes. The exercise also helps reframe the memory more constructively. I can confidently say getting dumped caused me to stop partying so much and may have saved me from myriad legal and health problems.
Another strategy was to build a mental rolodex of positive memories in your mind that you can return to. Doing this, and rapid fire indulging these memories can counteract your negativity instinct, and tends to put me in a much better mood.
A quick forewarning, I’d make sure to write this list out. I initially thought I’d be able to manage it in my mind, but it was much harder to build out and think through.
Here are a few from my list:
Picking up my 8-week old golden retriever from the breeder. He was a fat marshmallow shaped dog with a permasmile, who brought me so much dang joy in life.
Having Christmas mornings as a kid with my grandparents and the love they surrounded us with.
Going on walks with my beloved partner on St. Pete beach and sitting quietly with her in the sand and drinking a beer while we read books.
Helping raise money at events for wounded soldiers, and volunteering with the Special Olympics.
One last strategy is exploratory processing, which takes the opposite approach. You list out the painful experience just after it happens and leave two lines below it. Then, after one month, you return to write in the blank what you learned. Then, six months later, you list something positive that came from the mistake.
For example, when I bought my house, it was a complete circus and the inspection went poorly and I fought with the builder and the realtor. The entire experience crashed my hopeful vision of home ownership. I put this down on the list as my first entry. Then, I came back a month later and wrote about how the experience taught me the importance of having a home inspection (which I almost skipped doing).
Then, at the six month mark, I put that this experience still resulted in me owning a great home that I can now rest in knowing is safe. I know that it has given me and my partner new friends in the neighborhood. The house has also appreciated significantly in value.
Remember, it’s entirely normal and common to have tons of negative memories that pester you. Most major life changes are precipitated by bad experiences and it’s easy to carry those stories with you.
Consider compiling a list of positive memories to return to and combat that trend. Reframe your experiences by exploring the possibilities of how they came to be, and how you might be irrational and excessively harsh in reviewing them. Lastly, use exploratory processing just after something goes wrong. Approach the experience with curiosity rather than judgement. Something good usually comes from all of the chaos we endure.
I keep my hair short. Very, very short. Before joining the Navy, I was already doing so, but for the past twenty years, I have been unable to go much longer than a couple of weeks—or, in the warmer months, a week or so—before it feels as though something is wrong. Oddly, I don’t mind skipping a shave for two or three days, but actually wearing facial hair (beard, long sideburns) is out of the question.
While I’m not fanatically neat, I do try to keep items off the floor. Gear should be stowed somehow, whether in a desk, in a cabinet, on a shelf, or even on a table. The deck should be kept clear.
I understand the distinction between a command (Do it now!) and an order (Get it done!).
I am almost never, ever late, even to social engagements, as gauche as that may be. And “on time,” in my book, means approximately six to ten minutes early (no more).
Generally, I am far more situationally aware and cognizant of potential risks and dangers than I was before joining. People don’t plan to fail; they fail to plan.
A day without some kind of PT is somehow misspent.
I still lace up my shoes in a crisscross pattern, with no “bridge.”
Most of the year, regardless of whether I’m dressed formally or informally, I wear a T-shirt of some kind as an initial layer. If the temperature goes past about 75°F or so, I’ll wear either a T-shirt or a polo shirt. But even in the heat, I don’t like wearing a dress shirt without an undershirt.
I tell time with the 24-hour clock and write the date in the day-month-year format. This dovetails nicely with living in Europe.
Having qualified as an Expert with the 9-mm pistol and a Marksman on the M-16, I have contempt for gun nuts who brandish their weapons in public, exhibit no discipline or respect for them or consideration for others, and lack the faintest idea of what they are talking about.
A German soldier after being captured by American troops near Nicosia, (1943)
Last year, Carl Sergeant, 49-year-old politician, took his life after losing his job as secretary
The cause? False sexual abuse allegations.
The sentiment of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is being jettisoned. Now, mere accusation alone is enough to ruin someone’s career. Do you understand how dangerous that is?
Quote from BBC News:
“The family wish to maintain the fact that Carl maintained his innocence and he categorically denied any wrongdoing. The distress of not being able to defend himself properly against his unspecified allegtions meant he was not afforded common courtesy, decency or natural justice.”
You can’t make the cost of sexual interest the complete desolation of a man’s career, his reputation and even his life. We can’t keep branding people who sent a risqué text or blew kiss a pervert.
We’re now witnessing the birth pangs of the sexual reformation, the fallout from the sex abuse scandals that have plagued the entertainment industry, politics, and are now spreading throughout society as a whole. Third-wave feminists have been largely discredited over the past five years – just 18% of women in the US identify as feminist. Even less in the UK. Rights that actual feminists fought for a hundred years ago have been achieved, which is why radical feminists and SJWs need to hijack or invent new outrages to push their primary narrative and create more gender division.
Remember Zaira Wasim? Last year, she said she was scared when a man sitting behind her was touching her waist with his legs. At first, she ignored it, thinking it was due to turbulence, but didn’t tell anyone about it – not even the crew. Zaira put this allegation on a man named as Vikas Sachdev, a 39-year-old father and husband.
He was arrested. His wife defended him as innocent, but to the baying mob, allegations were all that were required to pass judgement.
Now don’t get me wrong, if sexual abuse is admitted or proven, those people should be punished to the full extent of the law. Hollywood and political peadophile rings should be exposed. But trial by a social media mob outage isn’t justice, and it sets a horrific precedent. Women are now jumping on the MeToo hashtag bandwagon so they can smother themselves in attention-seeking victimhood – not because they’re actual victims, but in one case because a man looked at them.
Another story was whipped up about Adam Sandler touching Claire Foy’s knee on a talk show.
In another instance, an MP was outed after he described a woman as “attractive, intelligent and charming”
Another case involved Michael Fallon trying to kiss a woman.
See the trend here? Everything is being conflated, to the point where making a pass at a woman is placed in the same context as actual rape.
There has to be an understanding that mere accusations alone are not proof. We have to put a check on this call of instantly believing the accuser without any regard for evidence.
It’s one of those David vs Goliath academic tales that’s as absurd as it is commendable.
Knorozov was a Soviet linguist – not a guy you’d expect to crack a Mesoamerican code. He got intrigued by the Mayan glyphs while rummaging through old dusty books in the off-limits section of the library. The glyphs hadn’t been fully understood for centuries.
The declassified Dresden Codex landed in his lap. It had been through hell: World War II bombings, water damage, and general neglect. But this old thing was a Rosetta Stone waiting for its sober lover.
While World War II suppressed the free exchange of scholarly thought, Knorozov was insulated and incubated over in Mother Russia. He faced another kind of battle, though: stifling Soviet oversight and scarce resources.
But undeterred, Yuri used his noggin. He hypothesized that the glyphs weren’t just individual pictures or symbols. They were indicative of phonetic sounds, a theory vastly different from what the scholarly mainstream believed.
Where many saw walls, Knorozov saw doors.
He hammered away at this theory, marrying the dots and bars of the Mayan numeral system to the text surrounding them. It was as if he spoke directly to the ancient Mayans, bridging a chasm of silence that had lasted since the fall of their civilization. Bit by bit, he began matching sounds to symbols.
His breakthrough publications hit in the 1950s. And like most disruptors, he was met with academic side-eye. It was the ‘newbie rocking the boat’ scenario. Many Western academics clung angrily to their dated theories, as if they were good luck charms.
But as time marched on, so did progress. Others began taking swings with the bat Knorozov had crafted. Additional findings corroborated his theories. The wall of mystery surrounding Mayan writing was getting holes punched into it, letting light in.
By the time of his death in 1999, Knorozov had seen his theories widely accepted. Mayan glyphs were readable, weaving tales of kings, conquests, and the cosmos.
What Yuri Knorozov did single-handedly is akin to solving a 1,000-year-old crossword puzzle without any clues, which makes you wonder, how many other historical whispers are just waiting for their translator?
From my home in Portland, OR, I look at Knorozov’s story as a beacon of hope for every solo scholar out there staring at an uncracked code. Keep at it. You might just be onto something.
Yes, but it had nothing to do with the procedure being inappropriate; it was an issue of consent.
I was called by a clinician to put a drainage catheter into an abscess, a pretty standard procedure; I was told that the patient had been reluctant, but had agreed to go ahead. Naturally I spoke with the patient myself, and discovered that she had not given any kind of meaningful consent; instead she had said something like “whatever”, just to get rid of the clinician, whom she described as a moron.
I called him up, with the patient in the room (but not listening in on the phone); I explained that I had spoken with her in person, and she was clearly unwilling to have the procedure. He then described her as a “seed person”, his term for someone who distrusted conventional medicine and preferred natural remedies; while I sympathized with his preference for proven treatments, it was clear that his attitude towards her was one of contempt, and that she had picked this up. He asked if he could speak to her; I told her he wanted to talk with her, she absolutely refused, and I conveyed this to him – softening her language slightly.
I then wrote a lengthy note in her chart, summarizing my discussion with her, quoting her comments, and explaining that as she had no intention of giving consent for this procedure, I was not going to perform it. I felt that she needed it, and I had explained this to her as clearly as I could; but as I was not her parent or legal guardian, I was professionally and ethically obligated to respect her wishes.
The right of a mentally competent adult patient to refuse treatment is absolute, whatever the consequences. My job is to explain those consequences as clearly as I can. The patient’s job is to make the choice.
An ex of mine, we dated for 3 months. He was significantly older.
In that time he got progressively more controlling. One day he heard a rumour I was cheating on him.
How I was meant to, I don’t know as I was always either at work (and replying to his messages) or with him.
He decided to throw me around and threaten me with 2 knives. Both of which he pressed against my throat. He also threatens to kill the friend he decided I was sleeping with. Luckily he gets angry enough and storms out of my home as there was no way I could physically move him and I lock the door.
I call my mum to come and get me away, she calls the police. All the time he is banging on the door threatening me and my friend. He keeps accusing me of calling “my other boyfriend” and how he will kill him when he gets there. He realises I’ve called the Police and goes for a walk away from my home.
I show the Police the knives and give a statement at the Police station. He is arrested and pleads guilty to the Police.
The Police Officer I was speaking to unofficially advised me to submit a request against Claires Law which eventually informed me that he had been connected to 5 other women in domestic violence cases. The last one whom he attacked with an axe, he went to prison for 3 months for that incident. These are just the reported cases, I have no doubt there are more who did not report him.
My case was deemed only to be a Magistrates case. The Magistrate on hearing the guilty plea gave a 12 week suspended sentence for 1 year so he could work on his mental health, a Restraining order for 3 years and “compensation” of £150.
I can’t believe the magistrate had a clear domestic abuser who showed clear escalation patterns increasing in violence to women ranging from stalking, assault and sexual assault and gave such a ridiculous sentence. It showed a lack of respect for female lives. I was advised not to attend court, it’s probably a good thing as I doubt I could have stopped myself shouting at the magistrate.
I had to flee my home, upend my entire life, develop ptsd and the perpetrator got a slap on the wrist.
A Nihang Bodyguard, (c.1865)
When Evil Parents Realize They’ve Been Caught
Damn! Damn! Damn!
Holy FUCK!
Curb Market in NYC, (ca 1900)
27 Minutes Of Rude Karens Vs Judges!
GOD! The USA is so messed up!
Observer on Iwo Jima, (1945)
A Massive Cat Abandoned at the Shelter Gets Adopted Within Hours
Crowded Bunks in the Prison Camp at Buchenwald, (April 16, 1945)
In the first place, I would like to say that you are right, to some extent. I agreed with you that we are somehow forced to learn some very entry level Classical Chinese, during the compulsory education stage (year 1 to year 9). This is the fact about Chinese education.
In the second place, since you asked why. I will try my best to answer your question.
The importance of classical Chinese:
In the narrow sense, Classical Chinese is the language which was actively used between Spring and Autumn period through to the end of the Han Dynasty (5th century BC to 2nd century AD). It soon became the formal written language in the Chinese society all the way until the 1910s when the Qing Dynasty was overturned. More than 2000 years of history was documented by using classical Chinese. It carried the invaluable heritage of our civilisation. In my opinion, it means much more to us than Latin to the European society.
In the broad sense, Classical Chinese is contrary to the Morden Mandarin, including classical Chinese (narrow sense), poems, novels written in the vernacular Chinese etc. It draws a whole picture of our great 5000-thousand-year civilisation, keeping people with hopes even in the darkest time of our nation.
Why government decided to introduce classical education.
China is a civilisation state instead of a national state. Anyone who recognises Chinese culture is considered as Chinese and could be integrated into the mainstream society, even he is not a Han Chinese. That is said Chinese people was united by a common written language, a universal value and a general social norm, even they may speak different dialects, live in a different region and have a different clan. This is also the most powerful argument to against the claims such as Cantonese is a distinct language instead of a Chinese dialect. The reason why schools in China teach both classical and Mandarin is, I think, it works better if taught together. Mandarin is the main structure and classical is a supplement of it. Mandarin is superficial which could not teach students some fundamental and abstract concepts. For example, people who only received Mandarin education would probably not able to understand the connections between the full moon and home sick (like a metaphor), autumn and depression etc. Therefore, promoting classical education would further strengthen the sense of national identity bound by the language and culture. That is the how to keep the nation united for more than 2000 years (Since Qin Dynasty firstly published a set of national standards). That is the political concern of the government. And this is also the answer to why not only Han Chinese, other ethical minorities are (not forced but encouraged) learning Chinese.
“月落乌啼霜满天 江枫渔火对愁眠” (The moon is setting. The crows are crying. The atmosphere is heavy with a chilly autumn frost. The maple trees and the lights of the fishing boats are reflected in the water. Yet I am unable to sleep because of sorrow.)This short poem was filled with culture symbols such as “moon, crow, autumn, red leaves and fishing boats”. Those culture symbols was consistently used till today, they speak themselves without the need of explanation. But it almost undecipherable for people without classical education.
Social response
In fact, there is far less unfavorable voice against teaching classical in school rather than that of English. Ministry of Education is planning to make the English language an elective subject in the College Entrance Examination (aka. Gaokao), but removing classical content is out of the question, definitely. Personally, I, although not excel it, rather enjoy learning classical than modern Mandarin. It is so concise, splendid, touching my soul so deeply. I was hoping one day I could like those famous poets, to put own feelings into such powerful words. People used to say ‘a picture speaks a thousand words’. Some classical quotes certainly could do the better job in the appropriate circumstance. Many Chinese leaders would like to quote some classical or come up their own.
President Jiang Zemin’s calligraphy, quoting national hero Lin Zexu’s poem. (were it to benefit my country I would lay down my life; what then is the risk to me)
China’s Premier Wen Jiabao wrote on the blackboard after 2008 Sichuan earthquake. “challenges make a nation much stronger”
Chinese also tend to use classical to name their children, their company etc. A name with good meaning would give people a better first impression. Actually, not only Chinese, people from East Asia and Vietnam will also use Chinses classical when giving the name. e.g. all Japanese emperor’s title of reign is based on Chinese classical.
Lastly, China, together with Korea peninsula, Japan, Ryukyu and Vietnam, shared a long history bound by classical Chinese language. All most all the history was written in classical Chinese. Due to some political concerns, both Korea and Vietnam abolished Chinese, making it a great loss in their culture. Now people living there could not understand what their ancestors wrote when they are visiting their historical sites. I can never imagine this happens in China one day, when our children visiting forbidden city and asking what exactly did the emperor write on the wooden boards. What a ridiculous thing?
Ps. It is rather funny to ask in such way. Forced?
It could be better to rephrase the question to ‘why Chinese student nowadays still need to learn classical Chinese’
He sacked a colleague the day my colleague was leaving for a family holiday. My boss (and owner of the business), Paul, just liked to show people he had the power. He was often petty and a micromanaging control freak. He seemed to like me, so most of the time he left me to do my thing.
My colleague, Ian, had become a friend, and we’d hang out after work. He had been planning an overseas family trip for some time, and had been talking about it for a couple of months in advance of the date. He had requested leave, which was approved, before making the booking. He was a friendly, genuine guy, and most of us in the office shared his enthusiasm for his holiday. We could see he was looking forward to taking his family away.
He was due to fly out on a Saturday. On the Friday, Paul called Ian into his office and told him he had changed his mind, he was revoking the leave. Ian tried to argue that the tickets were non-refundable, everything was booked, his wife had taken leave, and they had permission to take their children out of school. Paul wasn’t swayed. He made it clear, cancel or be fired.
Ian asked what was so important that he needed to stay, Paul didn’t give a real answer. He just shrugged and said, “it’s my company, my call.”
Ian called his wife, and then decided to do the holiday. He didn’t want to lose the money or let his family down.
He came and told me just before lunch what had happened, and suggested we go for a farewell lunch.
I was incensed! I immediately wrote a handwritten resignation, left it on Paul’s desk, packed my things, and went to lunch. I told Ian and some other colleagues at lunch that this was also MY farewell.
As lunch wrapped up, the others drifted back to the office, and it was just Ian and me, commiserating over a beer, when Paul came in, in a fluster. I had never seen him in such a state (I later realized it was because he was no longer in control). Paul loudly tried to convince me to stay, offered me everything (other than more money!). I just said no, calmly. He left saying something like “you’ll be back when you can’t find another job.”
I called in on another friend on my way home, and had a job offer that afternoon.
Beer Battered Fish and Chips
Ingredients
2 to 4 potatoes, scrubbed and cut into fingers
1 pound fish (cod, halibut, polluck, etc.) 500g
1 (12 ounces/355mL) can beer
1 egg, beaten until fluffy
2/3 cup milk 150 mL
1 teaspoon canola oil 5 mL
1 teaspoon baking powder 5 mL
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper 1 mL
1/4 teaspoon salt 1 mL
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour 375 mL
1/2 cup second flour amount for dipping 125 mL
3 cups canola oil for deep frying 750 mL
Instructions
Pat potatoes and fish dry with paper towels.
Heat oil to a frying temperature of 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). To cook potato chips properly, it is important to maintain this frying temperature. You may wish to increase the temperature slightly before adding potatoes as oil temperature will drop when food is added. Fry 5-6 minutes or until golden brown. While potatoes are frying, prepare batter for fish.
To prepare batter: Mix together beer, egg, milk and canola oil. Add baking powder, cayenne pepper, salt and 1 1/2 cups (375 mL) flour all at once, mixing only enough to dampen the dry ingredients.
Remove potato chips from the canola oil with slotted spoon, drain on paper towels, and season to taste.
Coat fish pieces in 1/2 cup (125 mL) flour before dipping in batter. Gently place in hot oil to deep fry. Cook until golden, about 6 minutes.
Remove from oil with slotted spoon; drain on paper towels.
When my grandmother found out she had terminal cancer, she gave away a lot of her things to her children and grandchildren. She gave my cousin her 6 year old car, she gave me her expensive vacuum cleaner, she gave my mother an 8 foot tall grandfather’s clock, that had been hand made by my mothers great grandfather, those are the only three I remember, but she had two children and six grandchildren, so you can see by the gifts, that they weren’t terribly expensive, but had some value.
She still owned her own condo, and had some savings.
Shortly after my grandmother had died, and the will had been read, I over heard my uncle talking to my mother. My grandmother had split the estate between my uncle and mother. My uncle wanted everything that my grandmother had given away, to be given back to the estate, as he felt that they were just loans. Then the estate would be split between him and mom. If the grandkids ( including his own kids) wanted what they had been given, they could buy it from the estate.
I was shocked, I had always loved my uncle, he had never seemed like a greedy man. But inheritance seems to bring out the worst in people. My mother and uncle fought for the first time that I ever knew of, and some nasty things were said.
Evidently he approached his kids to get the gifts back, and they formed a united front, and told him he was wrong. So he backed off. I would have never have known that he had a greedy side to him, if I hadn’t overheard that conversation. He died about 10 years later, and I never looked at him, quite the same as before I overheard that conversation.
When my grandmother found out she had terminal cancer, she gave away a lot of her things to her children and grandchildren. She gave my cousin her 6 year old car, she gave me her expensive vacuum cleaner, she gave my mother an 8 foot tall grandfather’s clock, that had been hand made by my mothers great grandfather, those are the only three I remember, but she had two children and six grandchildren, so you can see by the gifts, that they weren’t terribly expensive, but had some value.
She still owned her own condo, and had some savings.
Shortly after my grandmother had died, and the will had been read, I over heard my uncle talking to my mother. My grandmother had split the estate between my uncle and mother. My uncle wanted everything that my grandmother had given away, to be given back to the estate, as he felt that they were just loans. Then the estate would be split between him and mom. If the grandkids ( including his own kids) wanted what they had been given, they could buy it from the estate.
I was shocked, I had always loved my uncle, he had never seemed like a greedy man. But inheritance seems to bring out the worst in people. My mother and uncle fought for the first time that I ever knew of, and some nasty things were said.
Evidently he approached his kids to get the gifts back, and they formed a united front, and told him he was wrong. So he backed off. I would have never have known that he had a greedy side to him, if I hadn’t overheard that conversation. He died about 10 years later, and I never looked at him, quite the same as before I overheard that conversation.
They taught us how to wear boots. At the beginning of the session, the tough looking DS looked at us the only way a DS can do it.
I thought what the hell? Put them on and lace them up. Oh no. There was the Army way.
We found out how important the simple sock was in the Army.
“Socks must be pulled up TIGHT! No wrinkles or seams. Loose socks in your boot can be a painful thing and cause blisters quicker than your daddy’s willow switch. Pull them up tight. Keep them dry. Wet socks are not a soldier’s friend. If a soldier’s feet are unusable because of blisters, that soldier is unusable. Take care of those feet. Also, mark those socks.”
We had to make sure there were no wrinkles on the inner sole where the foot goes in.
“If there’s a wrinkle in your boot lining, give ‘em back and you will be issued new ones. Wrinkles cause blisters. Make sure your boot is TIGHT around your foot. Do not let your feet ‘float’ in boots. Floating feet cause blisters!”
“The boots are laced diagonally with the excess lace tucked into the top of the boot. Metal cleats and side tabs are not authorized for wear. Steeled toed boots are not authorized for wear. THAT gentlemen is why these are NOT steel toed boots. If they were, you would be crippled within two weeks. There should be at least a 3/4-inch minimum additional length at toe. DO NOT soak boots in water or bake in an oven to break-in. Boots should be worn in gradually at first with ever-increasing walking or marching distances while remaining comfortable.”
“The back of your boots must also be shined. Just because we’re looking at you from the front, wise asses, doesn’t mean we won’t give the about face order.
“The tongues of your boots will lie flat all along the top of your boots, not squished in like a piece of toilet paper shoved up the crack of your ass. Squished tongues cause blisters. We don’t want blisters around here. Blisters mean there’s a man out and the rest of you do twice the work. If I find a squished tongue in your boot, and I’ll check at times, it’ll be YOUR tongue lying on top of your foot under the laces!”
“If you do not follow these instructions, you will get my right boot up your ass and I’m telling you now, IT WILL HURT! DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”
This DS had at least size 13 boots. We understood.
When my daughter was one year old, we were living on the 18th floor in a high rise in the penthouse up top. It was surrounded by windows, and we often left them open to allow the deep and moist air from the sea to flood into the house.
One day, while I was holding her near the window, I used to do that often enough. It’s a truly beautiful view. You could see the beach, and the seas off to the beautiful skies and the tremendous cloud formations. Often we would stand there right on the edge. The window… pretty big …about 1 meter, by 1 meter square was open to let the wonderful air in.
So, one day I was holding her like I always did. She was in my arms… riding high… when out of the blue… without notice… she suddenly leaped out of my arms.
I mean it.
One minute she was calm and collected. The next moment she jumped out of my arms. This was a freak and strange thing, and it was ONLY my fatherly reaction that prevented her from falling 18 floors to her death.
What the fuck!
Now, ever since then, I am terrified of open windows in our home and we have multiple layers of bars and wires to prevent such an event from reoccurring.
You never know what is going to happen in your life. Prepare for the worst, but please keep a very positive outlook and do great and kind things to all.
Today…
Destructive for men and women
Popeye’s Red Beans and Rice
Ingredients
3 (16 ounce) cans red beans (2 cans with liquid, 1 can drained )
1/2 to 3/4 pound smoked ham hock
1 1/4 cups water
1/2 teaspoon onion powder
1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
1/4 teaspoon red pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt or to taste
1/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon lard
1/4 teaspoon freshly-ground black pepper
4 to 5 cups long grain rice, cooked and drained
Instructions
Pour 2 cans of beans with their liquid into a 2-quart saucepan. Add smoked ham hock and water. Simmer over medium heat for 1 hour until the meat starts to loosen from the bone.
Remove from heat and cool until the hock is cool enough so the meat may be removed from the bone. Place the meat, beans and liquid in a food processor. To the mixture add onion powder, garlic salt, red pepper, salt, and lard. Process for only 4 seconds. Beans should be chopped and liquid thick.
Add the third can of beans that have been drained of their liquid. Process just for a second or two; you want these beans to remain almost whole.
Pour bean mixture back into to pan and cook slowly on low heat stirring often until ready to serve.
Serve over rice.
Dire Straits – Sultans Of Swing (Official Music Video)
Reported abuse, even though I knew it would end my marriage and change my life completely.
I met him when I was 16. He was the first boy I’d ever fallen in love with. He was the first boy I called my boyfriend….and he was the boy who had every other first you could imagine.
I gave him everything I had. But it still wasn’t enough.
I found out the night I turned 23 that my husband of 5 years had molested my 13 year old sister. I didn’t know what to do. What to say, or how to react initially. If I’m being honest, part of me wanted to run away. Part of me wanted to go drown myself or take a bottle of pills. I could not wrap my head around what I had just learned. I remember looking into my sisters eyes and seeing how afraid she was. She kept saying through sobs over and over, “I’m so sorry I ruined your marriage. I’m so sorry I ruined your life.”
But it wasn’t her fault.
I called my parents (they were on vacation at the time) about an hour after my sister told me. I regret not calling them the second she told me. I should’ve been stronger.
The next day, we found out my husband had also molested my 9 year old sister. My parents told me they wanted to call the police. My dad seen I hadn’t slept all night, so he told me to go home and that we would call them together, when I came back.
I can’t tell you how close to suicide I was in those few hours. I drove home and kept wanting to press on the gas as hard as I could and slam into the side of the freeway. I wanted to die.
Who was this horrible person I’d just been married to for the last few years? How did I not see this happening?
Later that day (24 hrs after my sister told me) I called the police to report what he had done to my baby sisters. They came and interviewed us all separately. We had to go to the police station so my sisters could give their accounts of what happened again. They were brave and they were strong.
I cooperated with the police. They said without my husbands confession, he would never be prosecuted for doing what he did. Despite physical evidence showing both my sisters were telling the truth, there was no DNA linked to prove it was him who had done this to them.
It’s been almost 2 years, and nothing has happened. I separated from my husband that very day I found out. I knew my sisters were telling the truth about what he’d done to them. Not once did he deny their allegations…all he could say was “Please don’t call the police.”
Things have been hard on my own. Money is tight…we are still technically married, which I am ashamed of. I’m saving up for a divorce. My goal is to get it done this year.
He has gone on to live life happy like nothing happened. He met a girl online a month later and they’ve been together ever since.
My sisters struggle still, and I see how those events changed them. They go to counseling weekly, and my parents tell me it’s helping them.
I’m very often depressed and regret so much in my life.
But if I had to go back to that day and make that choice again to call and report what he had done….I’d do it all again.
To the person who is struggling to make that decision, tell the truth. It will be hard…but it’s the right thing to do.
Imagine surviving the Titanic by swimming through the arctic water with nothing more than a pair of shorts, then being one of the only survivors out of your 70 friends being blown up in WWI, and then escaping another sinking ship on the coast of Greece.
This was a reality for John Priest- a British stoker (someone who puts coal into the ships’ furnaces) who survived so many ship crashes by the skin of his teeth that he was nicknamed the unsinkable stoker by the media.
Born in 1877 in a working class district in Southampton, England, it seemed like John naturally had luck on his side. In 1912 when jobs become increasingly rare thanks to strikes and riots, John was one of the very few who was able to get a job as a Stoker onboard the Olympic, spending hours a day hauling coal into massive furnaces for a few shillings an hour.
It was there when one of John’s nine lives were spent. When the Olympic collided into the HMS Hawk in 1911, John was nearly killed on immediate impact. However, being the lucky sonofabitch he was, John slipped away at the right moment, sparing him being one of the 576 men who died that day. Incredibly, this wasn’t his first close call with death. He had previously worked aboard a ship called the Asturias that was badly damaged in a collision on its maiden voyage.
After surviving two ship crashes you would expect that maybe it was time to find a new career.
However, John decided to take a job on the Titanic simply because it seemed “safer” than other ships. And who could blame him. The Titanic was a massive cruise-liner, with thick walls and virtually indestructible. Hell, the Titanic was nicknamed “the unsinkable” by its crew. No way in hell could something like the Titanic topple to the bottom of the sea.
They were wrong. On Sunday, the 14th of April 1912, the Titanic hit a whopping iceberg off Newfoundland. Unlike the passengers who had very little knowledge of what was going on, the stokers down in the boiler room were going through literal hell. Icy water poured through the cracks drowning workers and furnaces alike—John and his comrades had to swim through the arctic flood wearing northing but shorts and a light cotton shirt.
Many of his friends drowned or simply froze to death, but John climbed his way through the Titanic floor by floor, hall by hall until he finally was able to get onto the deck.
However, he was too late. By the time he got onto the deck, the last lifeboat had left the Titanic. In panic, he decided to jump over the edge into the ice-cold water, where he bobbled alongside passengers and crew members alike. Screaming for help and pushing through frozen bodies, he was finally rescued by lifeboat No. 15; he ended up being one of the only stokers who survived the crash.
Yet his greatest feat would happen in 1916 during the Great War. In February 1916, The Alcantara, a battleship that John worked on, intercepted the German raider Grief, which was disguised a Norwegian ship. As Alcantara approached, Grief opened fire. There was a short, ferocious, close-range battle, at the end of which both ships were sunk.
The part of the ship John was on got hit directly by one of the missiles. A couple of his friends were blown up in front of him but John managed to escape withhis life.
When he returned to work, it was aboard Britannic, Titanic’s other – even bigger – sister, which was serving as a hospital ship ferrying wounded soldiers back to Britain through the Mediterranean. Having already survived a collision on Olympic and the loss of Titanic, it must have been with no small amount of trepidation that he joined the third of the celebrated White Star Liners.
If Priest did feel any nervousness, it was entirely justified. On 21 November 1916, the great ship struck a mine and sank near the Greek island of Kea. Once again, he emerged from the very depths of a foundering ship alive.
Luckily, this crash wasn’t as bad as the Titanic or the Alcantara where he saw his friends die beside him. Nearly everyone made it—however 30 people did perish.
After Britannic, Priest would achieve one final escape from a sinking ship. On 17 April 1917, he was a stoker aboard the hospital ship Donegal when it was torpedoed and sunk in the English Channel. He suffered a head injury and would not serve again during World War One. 40 men died but yet again, John made it out alive.
Most likely realising that his luck was gonna run out any time soon, he decided to retire and have a family. He was often at the very worst part of a vessel from which to escape, and yet he survived an astonishing litany of torpedoes, mines, icebergs and collisions to live out his days spinning tales in the pubs of Southampton. In 1937 his luck ran out. He died peaceful in his sleep.
The name “unsinkable” applied rather better to him than it did to the mighty Titanic.
When I was in high school, we ate lunch at your typical school cafeteria.
Our school had a shortage of cafeteria ladies, so the line was always frustratingly long. We’d stand there, for 20+ minutes waiting for horrible greasy food.
Every day, there was this huge football player who would saunter in and casually cut into the line — at wherever he saw one of his friends. He was popular and had plenty of friends. So this usually put him near the front.
The guy was built like a brick sh#thouse. His neck was as wide as my thigh (not that that says much). He could have easily kicked my ass.
Every day he continues coming in and cutting the line. For weeks this goes on, and I start getting more and more pissed off. Nobody says anything.
“Why does this guy get to cut the line?” I kept asking myself.
Sure — it only extends my wait by 30 seconds I’d wager. But it was the damn principle. This is kindergarten stuff. Wait your turn in line.
So finally, he came in one day, cut in front and I lost my cool and shouted, “Hey dude.”
Nothing.
I got 2x louder, “Hey dude — over here.”
He turns around and faces me from up near the front of the line. I held my hands wide and said, “Are you just going to cut the line every day? We are all here waiting like we’re supposed to. Get in the back.”
I expected him to get in my face and deck me.
Instead, he looked down, almost like an ashamed puppy dog, and relocated to the back of the line. I suspect the entire line was staring daggers alongside me.
Sometimes — you’re supposed to get pissed off. It’s on you to transfer that anger to a solution.
Don’t just vent.
Stay focused on the damage the person causes, not them.
I was in Florida visiting friends for spring break the year after graduating from UVM in 1991. I was staying with a fraternity brother in his apartment, located in a very large apartment complex typical of Florida, huge buildings that all look the same and have the same layout. They were practically identical, except for the numbers of the different buildings. We went out drinking on night and I got too drunk, fell off a barstool and got kicked out of the bar – without my friends, but with some other guy that lived in the same apartment complex as my friend.
Well, somehow we made it back to the complex, and I went with this guy to his apartment to do bong hits and keep drinking. I woke up the next morning with a raging headache, dry mouth, no idea where I was, and still drunk. I stumbled out of the apartment, out of the building and into another building that I thought was the location of my friend’s apartment. I found the door and started knocking rather loudly, thinking of course they were all hungover and still sleeping.
I heard a voice on the other side of the door asking “who is it?” I said “come on you mother fucker, open the door, you know who it is!” The voice denied knowing me, which upset me, so I kept insisting they stop kidding and open the fucking door. This went on for several minutes, until finally the door opened and there was a guy standing there with his wife and children!
I was mortified! It never occurred to me that I was at the right apartment number but the wrong building i.e I was staying in unit 11–125 but this was unit 13–125 or something like that. I apologized profusely and stumbled out of there, thank god they didn’t call the police.
The reason is that Krokodil is an ersatz drug. It is really shitty stuff, and no sane person will use Krokodil if reasonably pure heroin is available.
You do not buy Krokodil from a drug pusher. You cook it by yourself – and it can be cooked only where codeine is an over-the-counter drug as codeine is the raw material for Krokodil. In other words, Russia. No drug pushers want to kill their customers, and in Colombia the drug cartels quickly cleansed Krokodil off the streets – they did not want to lose their clientele.
The only asset of Krokodil is that it is cheap and it is a do-it-yourself drug. But since most of the junkies are not chemists, they don’t have the faintest idea on what they are doing. And they pay the price of their ignorance with their lives.
Chemically Krokodil is desomorphine. It is an opiate, which is prepared from codeine with SN2 nucleophilic substitution – basically the same process on which methamphetamine is made. The process is known as “Russian flag” – white codeine, red phosphorus and blue iodine.
The process is to first dissolve the codeine-containing tablets into a strong baseous solution (which will render the codeine into a freebase) and extract the codeine with organic solvent (paint thinner, gasoline or diesel oil). The water soluble compounds associated with codeine in the tablets are washed away in this step. Codeine is then backextracted into water as sulfates or chlorides with battery acid and added with red phosphorus and iodine. The stuff is then cooked so that the iodine forms phosphine, hydrogen iodide and phosphoric acid. Hydroiodic acid is a well-known reductant of nitriles, halides, and alcohols in organic chemistry.
The reduction process occurs using hydriodic acid alone or iodine and red phosphorus that form hydriodic acid in situ. The role of phosphorus is to convert back the molecular iodine formed during the reaction to hydriodic acid. The reduction involves a cyclic oxidation of the iodide anion to iodine and reduction of iodine back to the iodide by red phosphorus that is converted to phosphorous or phosphoric acid and phosphine. This step allows the cleavage of the methoxy group of codeine to form a hydroxyl group because when ethers are treated with a strong acid in the presence of a nucleophile, they can be cleft to give alcohols and alkyl halides. Hydriodic acid is also capable to introduce an iodide molecule in the codeine ring, forming an alkyl halide that is reduced after this This is not difficult because iodide is a large leaving group a very stable anion. This is known as Nagai synthesis. It is the same synthesis as making methamphetamine from pseudoephedrine.
The hydroiodic acid dehydroxylates the codeine molecule, forming alpha-iodocodeine, which is further demethylated with hydrogen iodide into alpha-iododehydrodesomorphine and further into dehydrodesomorphine. The double bond of dehydrodesomorphine is finally saturated to make desomorphine. When the colour of this concoction turns from dark purple (iodine) into light shitty brown, the cook is ready. The battery acid is then neutralized with drain cleaner. The result is a real witches’ brew which nobody except those who have lost all their will to live will shoot in their veins.
The tragedy is that this concoction could be rendered into completely harmless (okay, relatively harmless as opiates are not harmless) with two simple operations – liquid-liquid extraction from alkaline solution with organic solvent and recrystallization from ethanol. Desomorphine itself is no more dangerous than heroin. Alkaline solution, because it converts the desomorphine into freebase, which is insoluble to water but soluble to the organic layer. Recrystallization to further purify the stuff.
This concoction is bluntly put icky. Yes, there is some desomorphine there, but also the intermediary products (like dihydrodesoxycodeine [methyldesomorphine]) and iodocodide. And side products (other codeine analogues). The situation certainly isn’t improved by the fact the desomorphine is optically active, and the yield is racemic. Oh, and there are unreacted battery acid, unreacted iodine, unreacted red phosphorus and solvent residues – perhaps leaded gasoline – present. If you are lucky, you may have a samogon still for the distillation to distil those stuffs away. If not – ARMFYAOYO.
Because of the crap synthesis, the large part of Krokodil is mainly toxic by-products, phosphorus, pill binders, unreacted codeine, methyldesorphine, some strange codeine analogues and a small amount of actual desomorphine. Pure desomorphine is about eight times as potent as morphine and about three times as potent as heroin. The large amount of problems such as gangrene seen with Krokodil is the result of many junkies lacking the skill and inclination to purify and refine a drug and hence shoot up all the leftovers from their concoctions.
Okay, and then you are so desperate you inject that stuff. All those contaminants go in your body. And they really poison you from inside. Causes of this damage are from iodine, phosphorus and other toxic substances that are present after synthesis. Addicts often use readily available but relatively toxic and impure solvents such as battery acid, gasoline or paint thinner during the reaction scheme, without adequately removing them afterwards before injection.
You can recognize a Krokodil user from his or her smell. A Krokodil user smells from automotive fuel – he or she will sweat all that stuff off.
Krokodil has never made it to the American nor European streets, and never will (except in the expat Russian communities). It is simply so shitty stuff that the drug pushers will do everything to keep it away. Even evil has standards.
The most eye opening thing is just how much happier I am.
I was middle class, a Dentist making good money, socking some away for retirement. A lovely wife, a nice home, a Range Rover, a beautiful daughter.
Then I noticed that someone was stealing a lot of money from my business. Investigation revealed it was the “lovely wife” and when I confronted her she divorced me. She got the house and I got the mortgage. I did manage to keep the dental practice because it paid the child support. Plus she got a settlement of $90000. The family court in its wisdom would not even look at the $300,000 theft. And I was still in love with my wife and could not file charges with the cops.
Add in stage 3 kidney cancer, then add in stage 3 bladder cancer, then add in prostatitis, various infections and a 10 year on and off hospital and treatment journey. (YAY! the WA health Department)
And before you know it your $240000 a year lifestyle comes down to a $24000 a year lifestyle.
I have never been happier. I get $1000 a month USA social security and a similar amount from the Australian government. I retired and used my pension money to pay out the mortgage and convert the dental surgery into a home for myself. I have a couple of boarders to share the costs and we all seem to get along.
The true unexpected gift is that there is NOBODY yelling at me all the time, stealing from me, belittling me, slamming doors, maxing out credit cards, maxing out charge accounts with stores, preening in front of the mirror, getting drunk every night and becoming belligerent and violent. Then blaming that behaviour on her supposed Cherokee heritage.
He’s sort of famous for having mega-yachts. That’s a whole niche industry for billionare’s and he’s all in.
First, there’s this one that is $500M and was rejected from a port recently here in Florida for being too big.
Then he has this “smaller” yacht that has a helicopter and pad on it. This below boat is literally an “add on” boat because they couldn’t fit a heli-pad on his other yacht.
They are both obnoxiously enormous and for all the criticism you could give to Bezos for his ways of making his money, the yacht in particular is absolutely beautiful:
Bezos and Musk are an interesting contrast in ultra-billionaire’s. Musk keeps signing himself up for more work and drama.
Bezos decided to cash in and go live. Can’t say I blame him. You can bring all your friends out on the boat, have a paid crew that feeds you and keeps the place clean. It doesn’t sound like a bad life.
The Chinese birth rate crashed spectacularly over the trump term, and it wasn’t just covid.
Ask the several hundred million strong migrant labor from rural China about how the trade war and US sanctioned forex manipulation screwed with their livelihoods first.
There is immense pain in china, just because of the speed of the change forced on China externally.
No Chinese will seriously believe anyone who tell them foreigners are not messing with mainland lives when Huawei cannot even make phones to sell to mainlanders!
The silly message is only broadcast in foreign languages as entertainment for foreigners.
What more do we need to say when Joshua wong is considered the legitimate representative of Hong Kong at the reichstag and Capitol while a slew of mainland and Hong Kong officials are sanctioned?
No different from going “Chinese. Ha ha ha.”
Mystery in Cisco Grove: Don Shrum’s Encounter with UFOs, Aliens and Robots
The Problem of Evil is one of the biggest theological and philosophical conundrums in not just Christianity but any religion that claims to have an all-powerful and benevolent deity who watches over us.
For Christianity, the Problem of Evil is such a big deal that its various solutions get a collective name, theodicy.
It’s a philosophical rabbit hole people have devoted their entire lives to, and still, to this day, we do not have a good all-encompassing solution. So anyone who told you they could resolve the issue in 3 paragraphs either is lying to you or didn’t understand the issue at all.
The most common rhetoric is the so-called “Free will defense.” The idea is that since people have free will, God couldn’t stop humans from using their free will and committing evil deeds. But the free will defense does not explain why natural disasters, such as earthquakes and famine, happen and why the innocent must suffer because a few people decided to be assholes.
I hope you have fun on your journey of learning about the Problem of Evil. It’s an arduous struggle with very disappointing results, but a worthy pursuit nonetheless.
Here’s a question to get you started: can God create a boulder that’s so heavy he himself could not lift?
It is called an omnipotent paradox. It is part of the Problem of Evil.
Pappadeaux Sweet Potato Pecan Pie with Bourbon Sauce
Combine mashed sweet potatoes, sugars, egg, cream, vanilla extract, salt, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg and butter in an electric mixing bowl and beat at medium-low speed until smooth, do not overmix.
To assemble pie, spoon sweet potato filling into the pastry-lined pie pan. Fill shell evenly to the top with with pecan filling.
Bake for 1 1/2 hours or until a knife inserted into the center of the pie comes out clean. Store pie at room temperature for 24 hours.
Serve pie slices with Bourbon Sauce on top or to the side.
Pecan Pie Filling
Combine sugar, syrup, eggs, butter, vanilla extract, salt and cinnamon in an electric mixing bowl and beat on low speed until syrup is opaque, about 4 to 5 minutes. Stir in pecans, mix well.
Bourbon Sauce*
Combine cream and milk in a large mixing bowl. Slowly whip in pudding mix. Add bourbon and continue whipping.
Add vanilla extract and whip until mixture is well blended to sauce consistency (should not be as firm as pudding, but should not be runny).
Notes
* Sauce should be made about one hour before use; it will thicken as it sits.
HYPERSONIC Race 2.0 Begins: China Introduced ‘WAVERIDER’ With New Tech
I was a new hire as a mechanic in North Dakota. Techs are hard to come by up there and there is far more work than there is people qualified to do the job. For that reason, a human turd worked with me there. He had been there for years and from what I hear was a decent mechanic. He was having trouble figuring out why a heavy duty truck would not start. He had been working the problem for weeks and could not get it. Trucks were my specialty so the service manager asked me to put some fresh eyes on the problem. I had it diagnosed within a few minutes and it made the other guy pretty upset, his ego was bruised.
The other tech insisted I was wrong, I showed him I was correct and headed to the door to re-enter the shop. He blocked my path and started yelling at me, telling me I was not going to go and tell the boss I figured it out so quick. If I did he threatened to kick my A double S. I insisted I was going in and told him to get the hell out of my way. He shoved me back away from the door, not a good idea to do to a veteran with extensive training. I informed him that if he touched me again I was going to rip that arm off and beat him with it, then I reported what happened.
The boss did nothing. He didn’t want to lose his tech, even though he knew damn well it was a fireable offense. The guy came out of the office talking smack about how it was going to happen again. Other people saw him shove me, and heard him threaten me. Instead of fighting him, I called the cops. After all, it was assault so screw him. Cops showed up and he got hauled off and spent the night in jail. Then when he returned the boss still did nothing. A couple of weeks went by and this guy kept talking trash. I was honestly afraid I was going to hurt the guy if he came at me again so I called OSHA. They came in and both the boss and the turd were both fired. I quit shortly after, who wants to work for a place like that?
A pretty unlucky military event was when one of the most advanced U-boats, capable of taking down British and American war ships, was sunk because of a poo.
In World War Two, a German navy submarine named the U-1206 departed from the port city of Kristiansand, in Nazi-occupied Norway, and began its first combat patrol. Its job was to sink and destroy American and British trade ships.
This U-1206, unlike former submarines, had a new and “improved” toilet which allowed the U-1206 to stay deep underwater while people could go to the toilet and flush it without going to the surface, which was not possible before, as in other submarines, you had to go up to the surface whenever you wanted to flush the toilet which was a big problem because Allied ships could see you.
Advanced and new as it was, the toilet was extremely complicated. First, it directed human waste through a series of chambers to a pressurized airlock. The contraption then blasted it into the sea with compressed air, sort of like a poop torpedo. The toilets also needed a specialist on each submarine who received training on proper toilet operating procedures. There was an exact order of opening and closing valves to ensure the system flowed in the correct direction.
One day the specialist on the U-1206 decided it was a bit boring waiting to flush a toilet every couple of hours, so he took a walk around the submarine. But unfortunately he went for too long, and the captain, Karl-Adolf Schlitt, went to the toilet and decided to flush the toilet himself.
But Schlitt was not properly trained as a toilet specialist. After calling a random engineer to help, the engineer turned a wrong valve and accidentally unleashed a torrent of sewage and seawater back into the sub.
From there on, everything escalated quickly. The unpleasant liquid filled the toilet compartment and began to stream down onto the submarine’s giant internal batteries, located directly beneath the bathroom, which reacted chemically and began producing a toxic chlorine gas.
As the poisonous gas filled the submarine, Captain Schlitt — choking literally on a weird sewage chlorine gas — ordered the boat to the surface. The crew blew the ballast tanks and fired their torpedoes in an effort to improve the flooded vessel’s buoyancy.
Unfortunately for Schlitt and its crew, it got even worse. British planes on patrol saw the ship surfacing and attacked it, killing three men, and, because of that, it started to sink.
Somehow, the rest of the crew survived and floated all the way to the Scottish coast in rubber dinghies, where they were captured and taken to a POW camp for the rest of the war.
Schlitt survived the war and died in 2009. His submarine, on the other hand, rests on the bottom of the North Sea to this day.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was one of the most unfortunate events in military history ever.
When I was a teenager, there was a flood along the river where we lived. A large number of mobile homes that were located on the shores of the river were taken out, and destroyed. And six people were missing.
One day after the grand storm, I was walking alongside the tracks beside the river. I was in a remote section of the track. Perhaps two miles away from the town, and in the woods.
Eventually I came across a section that smelled really, REALLY bad. It was so foul that I got off the tracks and went to the edge of the river, where the smell was so damn intense.
I couldn’t see anything, and left. But that afternoon, I later discovered that a body was found at the exact location where I was standing looking for the body.
When I was around 11 I was snooping around in my parents room and saw their bank passbook sitting on their dresser. I opened it up expecting to see a healthy sum of money. Instead there was less than $30 in it. I saw the weekly deposits from my dad’s work and regular withdrawals for cash.
even at that young age I realized that we were poor and what little we had got spent on us kids. I felt terrible when I thought of all the times I’d pushed my folks to spend what they had on treats for me and my sister and brother.
A year ago, filled with a longing for Western freedom and democracy, I applied to the University of Auckland, thinking that it would be great if I could stay and work or live in New Zealand after graduation.
Now, I am firmly convinced that I should return to China after my graduation because:
1.The salary here is not as high as what I can earn in China,
2.The best city here is only equivalent to a third-tier city in China. Shopping and daily life are not as convenient as in China, and the cost of living is four times higher.
3.The knowledge taught in universities here, I can learn for free on Chinese websites, and it’s richer and more advanced.
4. I participated in two research projects at the University of Auckland and found that the level of research and development here is behind that of equivalent universities in China. I realized that by studying here, I probably won’t be able to bring back advanced knowledge. Therefore, I am considering returning to a Chinese university to further my education.
5. Moreover, I can feel that the majority of people in Western countries still believe they are more developed than China. This is the general perception, and I don’t need to explain it. I’ll just return to China and quietly contribute my strength there.
6. Western culture, there seems to be a preference for those who are boastful and talkative rather than those who are low-key and pragmatic. Coincidentally, as a Chinese person, I am not good at boasting, and I prefer to fulfill my responsibilities and then rest. The Chinese workplace is more accommodating to someone with my traits.
In fact, I spent hundreds of thousands of RMB to come to New Zealand, to see the real Western world, improve my English, and then met a group of Chinese students and a few friendly foreign students, and ate food that I wasn’t quite used to for a year.
I’m not a parent, but as a teacher I had to explain to a mother about bedtimes and sleep for a seven year old.
Her son was always tired and had difficulty staying awake during class. He was not working to his potential.
His mom came to discuss his poor grades. Come to find out, she was under the impression that he slept too much. So, she kept him up to midnight and had him get up at 6:00 a.m. No wonder the poor lad was always tired. I would be, too.
So, I explained to her that growing children needed at least 10 hours of sleep nightly as their bodies were growing and sleeping gave their bodies time to rest, heal, and grow.
She started having him go to bed at 8:00, especially on school nights. Within a week, he was brighter, more chipper, and the quality of his work improved immensely.
The interesting part? About a month later, he gave me a big hug and thanked me for telling his mom he needed to go to bed earlier.
I took my nice little VW Beetle Diesel to a mechanic for an oil change. After they got the car on the rack, the service advisor came out “Your car has a really bad oil leak.”
Before you go farther, bear in mind: This was a diesel. This comes in important later.
I go back to the bay and take a look at the purported oil leak. The bottom half of the back of the engine was covered in fresh, amber colored oil. “Oh, you’ve got a huge oil leak. You need to pay us $200 to diagnose the problem.” I called for the shop manager.
“Your employee claims that this car has an oil leak.”
He looks under there. “Yup. Sure does.”
“You know this is a diesel.”
“Why does that matter?”
“Have you ever seen the oil drained from a diesel?”
“Yeah.”
“Then you know that if I put fresh oil in this engine and drive the car three blocks, that oil will be as black as the Ace of Spades. This supposed oil leak, which is in a place oil can’t leak out of, is fresh oil.”
“Umm…”
“Listen. Clean all the oil he sprayed on my engine off it right now so I can go somewhere honest.”
The climate. Finland is located between 60th and 70th North, which makes the climate absolutely miserable.
The location means the winters are long, dark and miserable – sun rising at Christmas only at 09:00 in Helsinki and setting at 15:00. The situation isn’t exactly improved by the fact that Finland is located at the occlusion zone of Ferrel cell, which means the whole Atlantic comes down from the sky each Spring and Autumn. (Oh, Autumn is really Fall – I mean, rainfall. Finnish rain is not the warm shower as the Mediterranean rains, it is hard, cold and scourging.)
Finland has the worst of both littoral and continental climate: cool summers and freezing winters. Oh, and did I mention rasputitsa? Yup, we have it too.
The cold and miserable weather and the long and dark winter has left its permanent mark on our national soul. Finns tend to be emotionally cold, dour and close-minded. Not rude nor impolite, but cold. Sorry, no jolly reggae tunes here. Hero metal, power metal, black metal and prog metal. If your playing sucks, turn on more overdrive.
Which leads to another problem. Alcohol use is commonplace. Simply to carry over the worst. Getting hammered is a method to cope with the cold, dark and miserable winter.
Which leads to another problem. Suicides tend to be common, but not as common as they used to be. Many people simply cannot stand it all and quit their living.
Atheism is in Scandinavia a far older phenomenon than science. When the soil is poor, weather hostile and everything in the climate tries to kill you, you relate to supernatural as enemies and any deities as intolerable cosmic oppressors. The divine is not seen as a provider, but oppressor – as something which attempts to make living even more miserable than it already is. This is one reason why the Scandinavians are so hostile to religion and spirituality they tend to be. Already the Hrafnkell’s saga from 10th century tells of a Viking chieftain who ditches the Viking gods and becomes godhlauss, Atheist.
I wish I had wings so I could fly to Spain for winter like the migratory birds.
A bit of background: My parents recently got divorced and my dad got most of the money, furniture and he got the house. My brother (10) and I (13) only see our mom every second weekend and sometimes my dad just keeps us for the weekend. I always stop by my moms After school everyday to let her dog out and clean up any messes she made (She’s 17 and black lab). I usually wait there for bit until I have to pick up my brother.
Anyways, one day, my math teacher asked me to stay behind for a few minute so to talk about an opportunity to compete in a math contest. It was country wide and was for grade ten and eleven math. I’m grade seven but he said that’s he talked to the people who were running it. They said I could try but might have some trouble with it. I really like math so I said yes.
Fast forward two weeks and I’m sitting in the cafeteria with a bunch of really tall people. They hand out the papers and say go. I finish in about half an hour and turn mine in.
About a month ago i got the results and i placed third in the country. Apparently, there was a prize and i won three hundred dollars.
Now, my mom has been struggling financially although she didn’t tell us, I figured it out. Every time I stop by her house, I put some of the money in her jar and she hasn’t but noticed. I know it’s probably not a lot but I like to think I’m helping a at least a little bit. I can’t legally work yet…
When my due date was getting very close, I told my 3 and a half year old daughter that her little brother is afraid to come out of my belly. He thinks to himself: Oh, its a big scary world out there. Who knows what is awaiting for me outside. I’m just a little baby boy. I don’t want to go out and live with big grown up people all by myself.. Who will understand me and help me when I’m outside? Oh how I wish there was a little girl out there who would be my sister, so we can grow up together…
She was deeply moved when she heard this. She put her little hand gently on my belly, and whispered to her brother with a voice filled with tenderness. Come out little brother. I am your sister M. and I will always take care of you. You don’t have to be afraid. Few days after this, her brother came, and the love and connection that the two of them have is something I, as an only child, never imagined could exist. The way they cherish one another, help, encourage and comfort along the way is truly amazing.
It’s not going to eliminate the difference at all. However, it could help the less rich kids to maintain their dignity.
This is the most common school uniform in China. It’s ugly, oversized, and appeard since my school ages, but totally affordable. It wouldn’t change the fact that some kids have a poor family background, but it could reduce the possibility of students getting isolated in schools for either being too poor or rich. Trust me that kids do that all the time, and it could be quite hurtful sometimes.
Besides, with an ugly uniform, how one looks like purely relys on face. Dad’s mercedes or even GTR wouldn’t save it.
I am a welder and applied to a job through a temp agency. Their ad said hiring welders from $23 to $26 an hour depending on experience. They gave me a weld test and decided to hire me at $23. I told them I want $26 because that’s what their add said. I was told that was dependent on experience. Well I have 24 years of experience and I want 26. In the end I agreed to work for 25.
On my first night it was time to clock out so I went to the time clock and clocked out. I noticed all the other welders were still there cleaning up their work areas. I shouted at them so they could hear me, “hey it’s time to go. What are you all still doing here?”
I didn’t get an answer and left. Coming in the next day I asked them about this and they said they cleaned up the shop after hours on their time. With all the workers around and the boss I told everyone, “I don’t work for free. This mess wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t been here working. I won’t be cleaning the shop for free. I am loud quitting boss” as I made eye contact with the foreman, “when my shift is over I am clocking out and going home. I will have my area cleaned up before then.”
That night was the first night they did weld testing because new clients demanded all their welders were certified welders.
The next morning the temp agency called me and asked me not to go back to the job because I had been terminated for not listening.
The morning after I was called back again. I was the only person on 2nd shift who passed the weld test and many on first shift also failed.
Company representative: “Would you come back to work for us, please?”
Me: “OK but I want $28 an hour and switched to 1st shift.”
In Vietnam, when we meet someone for the first time in the new (lunar) year, we usually give each other a red envelope with some lucky money – as a good wish for a bright and happy new year.
I was in 11th grade in high school. We were just back from the Lunar New Year holiday (”Tết” holiday in Vietnamese), happily exchanging red envelopes and good wishes. Coincidentally, it was also Valentine’s Day that year. But, 20 years ago, I had no idea about that, so when this boy handed me the red envelope with a chocolate bar, “Happy Valentine!”, I happily took it, “Thank you! You’re so sweet!”, and I gave him a big hug.
Before he could say anything else, I opened the chocolate bar, broke it into pieces, and… shared it with the whole class, everyone got a piece. I couldn’t explain the emotion in his eyes when he watched that happened.
Years later, every time we meet up for our class reunion, he always brings this story up and we laugh. Still can’t believe I missed that hint.
CIA
Back in the late 70’s I found myself between jobs. I had 10 years as the GM of aof a chain of convenience stores which had been sold and that ended my job! My parents lived in the Washington DC area and one of their neighbors, who I had known for many years, worked for the CIA. At a neighborhood gathering while I was visiting I mentioned to him that I was job hunting and asked if he had any connections in the CIA. After we had returned home I got a call asking if I would like to interview so I flew back up and stayed with my parents for a week.
I was instructed to report to a building in Rosslyn VA which is across the Potomac River from DC. I remember having a hard time finding the address I was given because there was no name or numbers on the building. Maybe that was my first test! In any case, the interview lasted all week. One thing that I remember was is how low key the whole process was. Mostly a series of different people asking me a lot of questions about myself. What my hobbies were, favorite foods. etc. It reminded me of shooting the breeze with a bunch of strangers at a college mixer. Not much in writing, no physicals, drug tests, etc. Not many probing questions, very relaxed. Definitely the strangest interview I’ve ever had, and this went on for 5 days.
There was one woman who was my primary contact. From the beginning to the end, she was the one who was always there at the end of an interview and introduced me to the next person. Never their last name or title, just a first name, always in the same room, never in their office. On the 5th and final day, she brought me into her office and said that they would like me to work for them as an operative. I had never heard that term before, but knew that it meant that the CIA wanted me to be a spy. Immediate visions of James Bond came to mind. Fast cars, nice clothes, A GUN…all the things that we associate with being a spy. Obviously I was very interested.
I had a bunch of questions but the two that I remember were: 1. Where would I be stationed? and 2. What did they want me to do? I was married with two young children, and I was thinking maybe they wanted me in Europe where I had spent many years as a boy. WRONG! They wanted me to operate a small grocery store in PAGO PAGO! I had never even heard of Pago Pago, let alone knew that there was a large US Navy Base there. Out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles from everything and everyone we know, it was out of the question.
That was the end of my spy recruitment.
LOL. All, I do mean ALL of the stores in Pago Pago are owned by Chinese nationals. No fucking shit. -MM
I was a semi-freshly divorced single mom working in a chain of gas stations. It was my job to cover if someone called off and to run the money every day.
I had a reliable car only because my parents both took the time to teach me about cars including how to find a good used one and repair it when it broke.
I was enrolled in college. One class at a time is all I could squeeze in my schedule and budget.
My child was suffering under a rural southern school district. She is gifted and they had refused to set an IEP, refused to challenge her, and in fact persecuted her and myself due to our religion. We were told more than once we were going to Hell by school officials.
It was an uphill battle with them that required an attorney who volunteered his services. I couldn’t have afforded him otherwise.
Despite these difficulties, life was OK. We were surviving. We had food, shelter, and running water. My child never went to bed hungry or cold.
Then I started getting tired. Abnormally tired. I didn’t have the energy to function. My mother forced me to go to her doctor. She paid for the visit because I didn’t have insurance.
The doctor called me at work two days later and asked me to come in. I made arrangements for my child after school and I went.
He told me I was sick. Very sick. The tiredness was a symptom of this. It wasn’t just lack of proper nutrition or being over worked. This wasn’t something that could be fixed with a pill.
I started treatment the next week. I still went to work. I still took care of my child. I had to drop my class and adjust my schedule. I had to fight — and fight I did.
Then the medical bills started coming in. Uninsured and dead broke, I almost gave up. The state said I did not qualify for assistance of any kind because I made too much money.
If I had another child, I’d be at the income threshold. If I had another child, I could collect benefits like food stamps, Medicaid, and housing assistance.
If the state would have straightened out the child support instead of counting it against my income, I might have been able to pay a little bit of the medical bills.
I made arrangements for my child’s care after I passed. I had a small life insurance policy that would cover my final expenses. I managed to keep fighting.
The medical bills kept coming as did the phone calls from debt collectors. The threatening letters. The calls to my work. To say it was stressful is an understatement.
Until one day they stopped. The medical bills still came but showed a zero balance. The bills that had gone into collections were paid in full.
My rabbi approached me one night after services. He told me that a member of our shul had paid everything on the caveats I finish school and don’t stop.
I begged him to tell me who but he would NOT budge. He just said, “Finish your education and don’t stop.”
Finish school and don’t stop.
I still do not know who. I’ve had my suspicions, but I keep them to myself.
I have graduated but haven’t finished my education. (That is something that is never going to be finished.)
I haven’t stopped.
Smart Cat
Downtown Grill Catfish LaFitte
This is one of my favorite ways to prepare catfish. Even those who dislike catfish love it fixed this way.
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
2 large eggs, beaten
1 cup milk
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/4 teaspoons salt, divided
1 1/2 teaspoons ground red pepper, divided (may need 2 1/2 teaspoons)
4 farm-raised catfish fillets, about 1 1/2 pounds
Vegetable oil
12 large fresh shrimp, unpeeled
1 tablespoon butter or margarine
2 teaspoons minced garlic
1/4 cup sweet vermouth
2 cups whipping cream
1/4 cup chopped green onions, divided
2 teaspoons lemon juice
3 very thin cooked ham slices, cut into strips
Garnish: lemon wedges
Instructions
Combine eggs and milk, stirring until well blended.
Combine flour, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1/2 teaspoon red pepper in a shallow dish. Dredge fish in flour mixture; dip in milk mixture. Dredge again in flour mixture.
Pour oil to a depth of 3 inches into a Dutch oven; heat to 360 degrees F. Fry fish for 5 to 6 minutes or until golden; drain on paper towels. Keep warm.
Peel shrimp; devein, if desired. Melt butter in a large skillet over medium heat; add shrimp and garlic, and cook until shrimp turn pink, stirring often. Remove shrimp, reserving drippings.
Stir vermouth into reserved drippings; bring to a boil, and cook 1 minute. Add whipping cream, 2 tablespoons green onions, lemon juice, remaining 1/4 teaspoon salt, and remaining 1 to 2 teaspoons red pepper; cook 12 to 15 minutes or until sauce is thickened, stirring often.
Place catfish on a serving plate, and drizzle with sauce. Top with shrimp and ham; sprinkle with remaining 2 tablespoons green onions. Garnish, if desired.
Notes
I make the sauce first and keep it warm. I then fry the fish and finish the dish.
The Big Lie that Women Keep Believing in Modern Dating
As a 31-year-old Chinese person who lived in China for 30 years and has been living in New Zealand for a year, I find that this question seems to be of particular concern to people in the Western world, while we ourselves are not so concerned about it. I have also thought about this for a long time, and I would like to give a rather serious answer.
When I was living in China, politics really didn’t have much to do with our lives. In the daily routine of a normal person, we were essentially free and democratic. Moreover, from childhood, we learned about both Chinese culture and Western culture. We were quite familiar with the Western world from our media, and we knew roughly what the world was like. After going abroad, it was also easy for us to embrace Western culture.
However, after coming to New Zealand, I found that the Western media is full of prejudice against China and North Korea, while reporting differently on East Asian countries like Japan and South Korea. In fact, I particularly want to tell many Western friends who have never been to China that it is easy for us to accept Western civilization, but your points of concern about China seem to differ from what we care about ourselves.
Historically, China has never actively pursued religion, so how could it be actively enamored with politics? As long as the party does not disturb the people, we won’t pay too much attention to it, and a political party is the least intrusive solution. China is a country that has been agriculturally based for thousands of years. Our ancestors loved the land that could grow crops, and this love has flowed into our blood. The charming land that produces enchanting crops makes us ordinary people happy. China is large enough that whether at the top or among ordinary people, everyone can find their own focus in life, everyone takes responsibility for their own duties, rather than thinking about taking advantage of others or stealing from others. This is more efficient and safe.
If the leadership does not perform well, the people will resist together, and our history has always been this way. An ordinary person can grow to be a top figure in the country, or a top figure over a piece of land. With 5,000 years of detailed recorded history, many historically high-ranking people came from common families. So, when you ask if Chinese people want to live in a democratic country, I want to say that we have always been democratic. Every Chinese person knows: “The noble and the humble have no determined lineage,” but as a culturally united nation, if we are in a high position and do not make the contributions we should, we will be shamefully recorded in history, which is as important as life itself to every Chinese person. Thus, even though we have equal opportunities to become influential figures, not everyone wants to be the most powerful because that also means taking on more responsibilities, which can be more tiring (the positions of emperor, prime minister, and general in Chinese history were high-stress jobs). So usually for us, enjoying the life of an ordinary person also seems more relaxing.
However, it seems that Western politicians do not have the same immense pressures as Chinese leaders, nor do they have the same sense of responsibility. Your leaders seem very relaxed, speaking eloquently with expressive gestures, whereas our leaders are sparing with words, and mostly very serious. How should I put it? They are also under great work pressure, as they are not only supervised by hundreds of millions of common people but also by their competitors. But from my heart, I like this Chinese style where everyone has their role and does not interfere with others.
Compared to many Western countries, China is very open. I grew up in a very ordinary family in China, reading masterpieces from all over the world from a young age, experiencing different cultures, which is why I chose to go abroad after getting married and having children. I have also read modern and ancient Chinese books, which enables me to answer this question today.
For foreign friends curious about China, if you want to understand China, you are sincerely welcome to visit, especially if your daily exposure is only to English media. Because they seem to be the most heavily brainwashed region at the moment.
Somewhere in my graduate school years I noticed a trend.
An undergraduate philosophy major will sound absolutely brilliant. They often speak in a jargon-dense diction, delivered at high velocity, one idea bouncing off another to produce a spiderweb of spiraling associations. The effect, rhetorically and aesthetically, is often overwhelming. Logic doesn’t really play a role because one hardly knows what they are saying. The unwitting listener feels himself outmatched, drowned and blinded by the naked light of unbridled genius.
The graduate student is a much dimmer light. He is still full of abstract phrases and obscure references, but he is someone who is starting to sound, again, like a human being — explaining things, pausing, asking questions to insure the listener is following. This is not nearly as impressive as the undergraduate, but it does have the virtue of allowing the ordinary among us to understand what is being said.
The professor sounds like your basic “dad,” albeit one with a lot to say. He can at times seem unsure of himself. He pauses to define his terms and to add qualifications to his statements. He speaks carefully. He might even speak slowly. He explains as he goes, almost apologizing for whatever obscurities he falls into. His manner of speech is, well… designed to communicate! A quite boring and not evidently bright fellow, you almost feel embarrassed for him.
In light of these observations, I was forced to conclude that there is either something terribly wrong with our educational system — since the higher people go the dumber they get — or intelligence is not quite what we sometimes think it is.
In my van. We would drive away with the pedal to the metal. In 30 minutes, I could expect to get at least 50 kilometres away, and that ought to be far enough to be safe. Moreover, the van has a Diesel engine, so it does not need electricity to function – it will run as long as there is fuel and air.
If it was summer, I would drive to our yacht, put SCUBA gear on, and dive in the sea in the marina. There is enough oxygen to survive the blast underwater. Most radiation is absorbed in the sea, and the shock wave would not get to the water.
I dated a girl for a few years and we lived together for the last half of the relationship. Things hadn’t been great for several months before I decided to break it off, but it was a single statement she made that convinced me it was time.
The yard was in serious need of some attention. The grass was a bit high and we hadn’t done weeding in a few weeks. So I decided to spend my day off working in the yard.
I mowed the grass and edged the walks, I weeded all the flower beds, watered and fertilized our plants, got some new plants to fill in the beds. After I was done with all that, I decided to do some cleaning. I power washed the driveway and the house. The concrete looked brand new.
I finished shortly before she got home from work. When she got in, I was in the backyard admiring my handiwork. I was proud of how the yard looked. It hadn’t looked that nice in quite a while.
When she came into the backyard, I motioned towards all my hard work with my hands as if to says “look what I did!”.
The only thing she had to say about it was “You forgot to sweep behind the chiminea.” and pointed to a small pile of leaves off in the corner of our yard. Then went inside to take a shower.
Something snapped in my brain. All the times she had criticized stupid things just to have something to criticize came flooding back. I suddenly realized the obvious pattern that had been there all along. She didn’t just do it to me either. It was just who she was to everyone. She just enjoyed criticizing people.
I knew I couldn’t live life like that. I knew that if I stuck around, she would keep doing that for the rest of our lives and it would make me miserable.
I had just spent my entire day doing yard work in the middle of June and she couldn’t find one positive thing to say about it. I left that evening and stayed with a friend. The next day, I came home and broke it off with her.
I was about 10 years old, and in bed – about 11pm. I was supposed to be asleep, but as usual, I was reading by the light of my nightlight. I heard my dad slam the front door, and my mom yell. This wasn’t normal behavior, so I went into the living room.
The police were called, and my dad told me the story. Mom and Dad were in the living room, and heard a knock at the front door. We lived out in the country, and the neighbors all knew Dad was a doctor, so Dad thought it might be a neighbor needing help. When Dad opened the door, he saw a man with a mask standing there with one hand behind his back. Our super friendly, loved everybody German Shorthair, Ringo, followed Dad to the door. As soon as she saw the man, she gave a huge bark, and lunged for the guy. Dad said that 3 things happened nearly simultaneously – 1) he grabbed Ringo’s collar, 2) the guy pointed a gun at Dad (it was in the hand behind his back), 3) the man shot the gun. Dad slammed and locked the door. Dad was unhurt.
When the police arrived, they spent a long time looking opposite the door to try to find a bullet hole. At one point, one of the officers said that maybe it was a blank. But eventually, one of the policemen noticed that the row of art books we had on the bookshelf facing the door wasn’t completely even; one of them was pushed back about an inch. He peered closely at it, and noticed something odd about the O (it might have been Michelangelo) in the title – it had a hole in the middle of the O. He opened up the book, and sure enough, the bullet was nestled in the pages.
Needless to say, there was a rule in our house after that – don’t open the door at night without asking “Who’s there” first!
I used to own a small tavern. We had a guy who started hanging out there quite regularly. Nice guy, played darts with the other regulars, bought rounds in order , but didn’t talk much about himself or his past. But it’s a bar, so no one cares. We’ll call him John.
He was in early one night around 7pm. My staff is all away on lunch, partner wouldn’t be back til 10pm. I’m all alone. Usually not a big deal. This night, a couple of college jocks got way out of hand and started tearing the place up – breaking cue sticks and tossing around empty kegs. It’s just John, me and the college boys. I’m trying to de-escalate and get them to leave. Then, one of the big guys starts pushing me and throwing punches. I’m screwed. That is, until John steps in and beats the shit out of two guys much bigger than himself. I was completely shocked! We toss the guys out and he tells me not to call the police. He leaves shortly afterwards.
Next time I see John, I want to pick up his tab and chat. He asks me not to tell anyone or talk about it. I figure he’s ex-military and a private guy. He becomes pretty scarce. We’re looking for him, but he doesn’t come around anymore.
About a year later, we see his pic in the paper. He’s on trial for a pair of mob related murders. Turns out he might be responsible for more than a couple of these. I’m very glad he liked me.
US Ambassador threaten to shut Ghana’s economy down if Anti-Gay bill pass
I lived in northern Manitoba and southern Ontario, both in Canada, for about 25 years before I moved to southern Maryland. Snowmageddon struck in January-February of 2010. Everything was shut down for 10 days or so. Finally, I ventured out onto the roads.
My apartment complex fronted a 4 lane divided roadway, which was a designated Snow Emergency Route. The left lane was bare, the right lane was still covered with ice and slush. Both lanes were blocked where an SUV had gotten stuck then started to slide into the ditch to the right of the road. Pickup trucks, cars, other SUVs, vans, all were parked higgly jiggly and tall, brawny men were attempting to get the vehicle out.
I parked well back, walked to the crowd in my Canadian snow boots, and offered to help. They all had a good laugh, then turned away. I tapped on a man’s arm, “I grew up in Wisconsin and lived in Canada for 25 years. I know snow.”
“Hey, let the little lady here give it a try!”
I cleared them away from the car, crunched around it, repositioned the men, instructed the driver to straighten her wheels and put it into LOW gear, no gas! Told the men to push again, rocking, and told the driver to release the brakes.
The SUV popped right out of the icy ruts and kept going. Silently, the men returned to their cars and left. Too cold for crickets, I guess…
I was interviewing for a Canadian regional sales manager’s job for a company that sold patent medicines, made in Saudi Arabia. (Yes, I wrote the correct country name.)
After having introduced ourselves the interviewer handed me a package of papers, about ten pages thick.
“I’ll be quiet for a few minutes until you have read and signed this.”
It was the most horrible secrecy agreement you could imagine. If I break this, my grandson’s firstborn would be burned on the stake, or something along those lines.
I put it down, and politely bade my adieus.
The interviewer followed me all the way to the elevator door, trying to explain that not all was cast in stone. Some details could be negotiated.
I entered the elevator and left.
My next job was selling industrial valves, no secrecy agreement required. (I stayed there 9.5 years.)
The school arranged for a bus load of junior high students to go to a live play in the city.
This was the second bus trip in a month. The first one had gotten a little steamy on the ride back to the school in the dark. But not so bad it stopped the second one from happening.
The second trip, stopped all future bus trips, and caused a general assembly to be called. The principal and vice principal were dismissed at the end of the school year.
I didn’t have a girlfriend, and my best friends sister wanted to make out with me, but I knew that would end my friendship with my best friend. She wasn’t attractive enough to risk that.
In the back row, you could only see two guys sitting up, one in each seat. There had been girls sitting beside them when we left for the school.
What brought it to a head, was that the majority of students had hickies that were visible to their parents when they got home from the school trip.
There were a lot of phone calls leading up to the general assembly. It was amazing how many students had purple splotches, vainly trying to be covered with turtle necks, and long sleeves, and they had to sit in the front row of the general assembly, as we were told the consequences of our actions.
One day, she came home with a bruise on her cheek – just a small one, but it was a bruise. I asked what happened to her? She told me that a patient’s son hit her in the face because he thought she was ignoring his father – who was in pain while actually she was busy with another patient who was more critical. I asked her what happened next? She told me: “Oh, I came to that patient as soon as I finished with the one I was working on. Talked to him, comforted him and gave him some meds. Then I explained the situation to the son, and he apologized”. 7 year old me that day got angry and asked: “Why? You’re the best nurse, why didn’t you let someone else deal with that patient? His son hit you. He didn’t deserve your care!”
And my mom’s answer that day became one of the most important lessons I carry with myself through life: “Sweetie, you should never let someone’s bad action to be the reason for your own. Fixing something wrong by doing something wrong will never work. That man hit me may have been wrong, but if I hadn’t taken care of his father, I wouldn’t have been right. Moreover, it was the son who made the mistake, why should the father has to face the consequences? Your mom is the best nurse, so I do the best, right?”
So, if my neighbor never says hello to me first? That doesn’t stop me from saying hello and wishing them a good day.
I still believe that in this world full of sad/angry people, it’s much better if we’re sweet to each other, even just a littleeeeeee bit.
I strongly condemn Chinese military using sonar of mass destruction near Chinese coast which caused damage to Australian soldiers close Australian coast.
Wait… the Australians were near Chinese coast.
Oh… so you were their collecting seabed information, right?
In case of WWIII, it would be useful to intercept Chinese submarines.
International water or not, it’s definitely a hostile activity against China.
I can already make the draft about the same thing but reversed, i.e. PLAN soldiers got hurt by Australian sonar near Australian coast.
There is no “pro-China government in Australia”.
We know that already.
Stop lying.
Miao Ethnic Group
This is one of the 65 recognized ethnic groups in China.
The flags for the cars at my mother-in-laws funeral.
Well, they tried.
When they were doing their consult, they went over about a million things with my wife, and her brother. Both of whom were pretty deep in grief as they had just lost their mother. This woman was more of a mother to me than my own, so I wasn’t exactly NOT grieving.
Before my wife signed on the dotted line, she asked me to look the paperwork over. I saw a HUGE line item, it was around $2000, and just listed as “flags”. I asked the wife about it, and I asked the brother-in-law. Both had no idea what it was. I asked the representative from the funeral home, and they said it was for the funeral flags for the cars. The little magnetic “flags” that say “FUNERAL” on them. They are plastic, and have a magnetic base on them and you put them on your front fenders. If you have seen a few funeral processions, I’m sure you have seen them.
So I asked why we were paying $2000 for these.
I was told we had estimated 100 people, and they charge $10 per flag, and 2 per car. so 100x2x$10=$2000.
I asked if these were required, or if they thought that literally every single person was going to be driving their own car, or, the pretty obvious question, would this get re-rated based on how many people ACTUALLY showed up and needed a flag.
I was told that no, they were not ‘required’ but that they were recommended to make it more visible, and that wouldn’t my MIL want that item? They would re-estimate based on how many cars I expected (yeah, they KNEW that the estimate of how many guests was NOT the same as how many cars there would be), but that once the order was put in, it was non-refundable, and that if we didn’t use them all, then that was just how it was. They were basically being paid to make them available.
I went back to the wife and BIL, and explained, they agreed, nope, not necessary. I told them we didn’t need this, and to remove it immediately. They acted like that was some manner of travesty, and basically implied that people would think poorly of us for it. I knew my MIL, and KNEW she would have spit her teeth out if we had wasted $2k on this. There was a lot of shade from the funeral people for this.
Strangely enough, day of, not a single person asked about the flags. We turned out headlights on, and drove in procession with absolutely no problems whatsoever. Ironically, the only vehicle with the flags was the hearse, it had them permanently attached to it. We weren’t charged for that.
The funeral industry literally preys on people at their most vulnerable. They prey on your emotions, and your fears and insecurities. They have no trouble manipulating you into paying more than is necessary, and they will pad that bill out to match any insurance you might have. Do NOT just give them the insurance information, magically, if you have $35000 in insurance, they will eat every penny of it up. We had, $0 and paid every penny out of pocket… They still tried to pad the bill at every turn.
“What is the most absurd thing you’ve been charged for on a bill?”
edit
yes, these ARE reusable, and yes, they are returned after the procession, and yes, that does make it so much worse.
Good men won’t stick around if they are unwanted
Canadian “Mercenary” Killed By Russian Army in Ukraine
When I decided to move halfway across the Earth, from Vietnam to the U.S. to marry my (then) boyfriend, the only ‘condition’ I made my boyfriend agree to was I wanted him to move closer to his parents. My reason was that I would be in a new country, I wanted to stay close to our family. He agreed.
So, when The Teenager & I moved over, we settled down in a place within one hour drive from our parents.
Then came the first meet-up, we invited a few other family friends over. My mom & I were in the kitchen preparing food when a lady came in. She saw me, smiled, and asked my mom, “So, here is your daughter-in-law hah?” My mom smiled back at her, “No. She is my daughter in love.”
That sentence struck a harmonious chord within me and made my heart sing.
My wife and I were living in our first house in Oklahoma City. One day while we were both at work, the city sewer department tore down all the fences in the rear of the houses on our block to replace the sewer main. When we got home from work we were heartbroken because we had had our young dog in the backyard and now he was nowhere to be found. We searched the area for days and put up notices but to no avail.
We were starting to believe that we would never see our dog again. My wife was so upset she decided to call the city to “give them a piece of her mind” about the lack of notification on the sewer work causing us to lose our dog.
So she gets a person on the phone from the city’s Ombudsman Department. My wife explains the situation and tells the person that we loved that dog and had paid good money for him because he was a registered Irish setter. The person asks where we live and my wife gives our address. The person says “Well that’s amazing. I live about a half mile from you and there’s been an Irish setter hanging around lately.” My wife tells me the address and when I got to the person’s house, there’s our dog.
Oklahoma City is a big metropolitan area. Of all the people in the metro area my wife might have got on the phone, our dog happened to be at that person’s house.
I managed a cookie shop once. It was in a college town, and was open til 11:30 pm. At the end of the night, a homeless person showed up asking for cookies. I gave him some.
the next night, he brought 3 friends. There were just enough cookies for them. The next night, I was swamped. Literally dozens showed up. I didn’t have enough cookies for all of them. The crowd became enraged. They started yelling at me, then they started throwing things at me.
i told them not to come around again, there would be no more free cookies. I had to take a cab home that night, it was unsafe for me to walk.
The next night, a few of them started following me as I walked home. They were loudly talking about how they were going to rape and kill me. I ducked into an open business and called a cab home again. I was very young, and made just over minimum wage. I couldn’t afford to take a cab every night, but I had to for weeks.
I did make arrangements with a night nurse, who worked at a local hospital. She dropped by at closing every night on her way to work, and picked up the last cookies to take to the break room.
Having had that experience, I would never give food from a restaurant to homeless people again. Many years later, I owned a bakery, but still remembered my lesson.
The UFO Incident That Shocked Ariel School: Telepathic Extraterrestrials (Re-Edit)
“It’s like story time for grown-ups. I really appreciate this channel. Hecklefish is my spirit animal.”
I was banned from my local Walmart because I miss scanned an item. I went to self checkout one day because I had 4 items and wanted to teach my sons how to scan items. To make the story easier to understand, I had a tshirt, set of bras, shorts and some socks. While scanning, we had accidently double scanned the bras rather than scan the shorts, honest mistake. We finish up and as we are heading out, loss protection stops me and says “My name is XXX I’m with loss prevention please come with us” I was genuinely confused, my son got scared because of how aggressive they were but we complied. While in the security room they proceeded to rummage thru my bags and asked to search my purse. Again, I complied, but they never explained why I was pulled in. They searched cameras for probabaly 20 minutes. At one point, I hear one of the workers call across the radio “We need security detail for an escort.” I started getting REALLY scared and demanded an answer. Finally, they explain I miss scanned an item, because of this I am being escorted out of the building and will not be allowed back on property, should I step foot on property I will be arrested. I was baffled! They didn’t even give me a chance to fix my honest mistake! Needless to say, again I complied, but I put in a call the corporate after leaving, they reached out to me and lifted the banned immediately, apologized, and fired the entire loss prevention team. It wasn’t the first time they had abused power!
Every shit that the US does on China, the Chinese can do even more, faster cheaper and more painful to the U.S.
China prefers not to but it is always ready. Chinese people has a saying. If you do it on the 1st Luna calendar. We will reciprocate on the 15th. You mentioned rare earth but this is just one out of a thousand measure. It could checkmate the US. Don’t even think about it. Every hurt on China will be returned by several fold hurt on the U.S.
After I had disconnected the call, I thought – What if it was a call from my best friend, would my response have been the same?
The answer was a big no and I was unable to figure out why. This restlessness drove me to call him again.
Dad: What happened? Are you ok, son?
Me: Yes, I’m fine, Dad. Just, missing you a lot.
He was surprised at first and thought I needed money.
Soon after, I began cracking few jokes (lame ones) to which he laughed his heart out. We talked for straight 40-45 minutes, engaging in topics we had never discussed before.
Strangely enough, I felt like talking to a different person. The person whom I had spent my life with, yet knew so little about.
The blissful conversation ended with a ‛Khush Raho’ (Stay Blessed!) from his side and a wide smile from mine.
And so, I realised, not taking your dear ones for granted and making a deliberate effort to know them is something worth consider doing.
In ancient China, common people had the following ways to meet the emperor.
1. The imperial examination. The final stage of the imperial examination is the palace examination, which is personally supervised by the emperor.
2. Assassination. The emperor went out to patrol and ambushed him by the roadside. Even if the assassination fails, before being executed, the emperor will personally question you, who is behind the scenes?
3. Emperor Banquets Centenarians. This is a large-scale honoring and respecting activity for the elderly where the emperor invites centenarians to participate in the royal banquet. But the prerequisite is that you must be able to live healthily to a very old age despite the lack of medical treatment and medicine in ancient times.
4. Become a eunuch. This is not recommended because ancient castration surgery was very risky.
5. Becoming a famous prostitute. Although the emperor had many wives, he would never refuse beautiful women.
When I was in Malaysia, during breakfast they served dim sum in addition to other traditional breakfast foods and it was very nice. However, Malaysia is a country with a 20% Chinese population. Back here in the West we don’t have a high percentage of Chinese people. There are some Westerners like myself who would enjoy Chinese food, but the majority of people who would eat it would be Chinese people themselves. The lack of demand means there is little incentive to supply it.
1999. I had a four-year-old Internet advertising agency with 15 employees. A global corporation was buying it.
Weeks before the sale was finalized I had an early morning doctor’s appointment and saw these cups in her bathroom marked URINE SPECIMEN.
I took a bunch of cups, got into the office before any of my employees arrived, left a cup on each person’s desk with a memo that said the buyer required a urine test from everyone in the company before the sale could be approved. A nurse would arrive at noon to test the samples.
One by one they trickled in and proceeded to go batshit. Violation of my rights. They can’t do this. My personal life is my personal life.
I commiserated, but reminded them that if I didn’t sell the company, we’d probably go belly up, and we’d all be out of a job.
Not a lick of work got done all morning. Finally, at noon we all gathered in the reception area, each of us holding a full urine specimen cup.
I spoke to the group. “Guys, I hate this as much as you do.” I looked at my cup. “And I really hate my sample. The color of this piss is terrible. I think I’ll run it through one more time.”
And then I drank it.
I didn’t have to tell them it was Peach Snapple. They knew they’d been had.
15 people. 45 man-hours (and woman-hours) wasted. Pissed away, so to speak. And I loved every second of it. Best. Prank. Ever.
“Hey guys, it’s Heather. I’m running a bit late, but I should be there in a…..”
There was absolute silence in the room.
“Message received: September 3rd at 11:55 am.”
Not a word was spoken among the three of us listening to the message and none of us could muster anything useful to say afterwards other than a very weak, “save that message”.
It was September 5th. In less than 24 hours, we would be going to Heather’s funeral. Her car had been t-boned by a large truck and she had been killed instantly.
The police report showed that the accident had happened on the 3rd. Slightly before noon.
Try to fully understand China. Unless you do you will always have imaginary Chinese action. Let me help you. To China currency is meant to help transaction and to store wealth not trade currency for currency sake.
To China and to BRICS the SWIFT and its manipulative money trading scheme is just another western conspiracy to destroy countries by a stroke of a pen. China will not and will never play a meaningless game it is stacked against. China. So
it will not internationalise RMB or the Yuan. It will not try to helped prop it currencies artificially and it wanted a real currency value that. Is sustainable trusted. Playing Russian roulette’s with its 1.4 billion people’s wealth is not what China will do.The U.S. dollar used to be able to buy 100 items to day a mere 78 years later it can buy 3 of the same item. That is not good for Americans.
In fact between 1980–2020 Real Chinese income grew 30 times and the U.S. during the same time frame not only not grow. It went back to the 1960 level. So try imagine this. American today is doing worst than their grandpa! China wants its currency to buy roughly the same 78 years later. And an average Chinese have 50 times more Yuan.
What’s the funniest reason you’ve been called in to school to collect your child?
We were called to get our 16 yo boy. He had drunk a bottle of some alcohol during the lunch break. Then during the relaxation class, he fell asleep. When we got there around 90 minutes later, the high school was closed. We couldn’t get there any earlier as both of us worked around 70kms away.
We discovered from the cleaner he had been taken to the police station as they couldn’t depend on when we would get there.
Unfortunately, the police [ it was a small unit] had been called out to a large bushfire. So they put him in the outside exercise yard. The problem was it didn’t have a roof. When our boy saw us coming he climbed the chain wall and high-tailed it.
He slept at a mate’s place that night. The next day the high school said they were going to have him placed under care. His mum also a school principal said, “ over my dead body”.
We came and collected him. He was terrified his mum was going to hit the roof. Which she did.
We got called by the police to discuss his behaviour as they wanted to know how he had purchased the bottle. We counted with how could you lose our son when he is in your care. In the end nothing became of it and our son grew up and gained some brains.
As my first son learned to crawl and then walk, my wife and I played mantras to him, meditated by his side, and lit sacred sandalwood incense around him.
We co-slept and in the day he was always strapped to one of us, skin to skin.
He was breastfed exclusively for nearly a year and then given only organic, vegetarian food.
We didn’t buy him any guns or other toy weapons, only simple wooden and cloth playthings.
He was so peaceful that he radiated a tangible serenity.
Which made her happy—and me—because we wanted him to be calm, loving, and spiritual.
He’s seven years old now.
His favorite dish is a medium rare burger, he knows an embarrassing number of juicy curse words, and he’s obsessed with Nerf guns.
He likes to listen to rap music with phat bass lines, he finds talk of spirituality to be boring, and is not in the least bit interested in receiving affection.
But everyone is impressed by how determined, free-spirited, and bright he is.
And between you and me, I’m kind of happy he chose to do his own thing, to be his own being.
We love him more intensely than the blazing of the sun.
It took me a long time to realize that you can spend years and years of your life aiming for a particular outcome, just to have things turn out wildly different than you anticipated.
It took me a long time to realize that life is like a wild animal, like my son—fierce and free and beautiful, but ultimately, unpredictable, untamable, and unruly.
And I have the feeling it might take me the rest of my life to fully realize that this built-in uncertainty gives life a unique flavor that, after being acquired, tastes exquisitely delicious.
It could be because a lot of older people have tooth problems. An older relative, has dentures, I suggested that we go for steak, and she countered with a fish place, so she could be sure, that she wouldn’t embarrass herself having problems eating a tough steak.
The next time she was over, I had bought tenderloin steaks, and I cooked hers medium, which wasn’t as well done as she would have liked it, but was still pretty tender. Ours were medium rare.
She was upset with me, saying that she wouldn’t be able to eat the steak.
I showed her I could cut mine with my fork. She took one bite and was in love. She hadn’t had a steak she could eat in 10 years. She finished the whole steak, which she had said was too much, when she was looking at it. But once she started eating she couldn’t stop.
Every time we eat at restaurant, we have to make sure there is something on the menu that is soft for her.
So this is one possible reason.
Swarms of drones – kamikazes – attacked USS Thomas Hudner
The USS Hudner (DDG-116), an Arleigh Burke-Class Destroyer of the United States Navy, was attacked by a swarm of drones this morning, while patrolling the Red Sea. The ship sustained no damage or injuries to its crew.
US Central Command (CENTCOM) reported the incident after Houthis in the country of Yemen, took credit for launching the attack.
Houthis are now attacking United States Naval vessels over US Support for Israel, as the Israeli government engages in conflict with the Municipal Government HAMAS of the Gaza Strip.
The Houthis launched swarms of Iranian-made “kamikaze” drones in an unprecedented act of war.
Yemeni rebels who have become a force to be reckoned with in the Middle East, attempted to sink the U.S. vessel.
Not much more than a few thousand, which is surprisingly small. This is based on our DNA.
Unlike our chimpanzee cousins, all humans today have virtually identical DNA. In fact, one group of chimps can have more genetic diversity than all 8 billion humans.
Our minuscule genetic diversity indicates that at some stage, around 70,000 years ago, the human population dwindled to a very low level — maybe 2,000. In fact, it looks like we came close to extinction.
It was also around this time that our ancestors began migrating out of Africa.
This suggests there were dramatic changes to our traditional environment, possibly caused by the Toba supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago, the biggest eruption in 2 million years, which left entire regions devastated by ash and climate change.
It’s 1964. Republicans are sane and intelligent. But they just got handed one of the largest losses in modern history, with LBJ winning the largest popular vote majority since James Monroe in 1820. Desperate for votes, they start pandering to racists who are upset about the Civil Rights Act and desegregation.
It’s 1974. Republicans just had their President outed as a criminal. They need an edge to get back in power. They start pandering to evangelicals, hoping their ability to believe in things they can’t see will make them easy targets for brainwashing.
It’s 1984. Republicans are scoring big points thanks to looking like the tough guys in the Cold War. They double down on the idea of growing the defense budget.
It’s 1994. Republican economic policies are dividing conservatives and just cost them the White House. They launch a 24-hour fake news channel to keep their base uninformed.
It’s 2004. Democrats have nominated a war hero for President and he should easily defeat the Republican incumbent. It’s time to start lying about his war record. Disinformation becomes the new norm.
It’s 2014. The economy is good. The nation is safe. But the President is black. Republicans dig up the 1964 playbook and capitalize on racism in their base.
It’s 2024. Sixty years of tactics have produced Republican voters who are racist, uninformed, misinformed, brainwashed, and violent. Now these people aren’t just voters anymore. They’re in Congress.
The president of the United States
China’s New Subs and Sonars Challenge Supremacy of US Silent Hunter Fleets
The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) surpassed the US Navy in total number of warships in late 2021. Technologically too, China has made major strides, including in the area of submarine construction and detection. These advances have sparked concerns from observers that America’s powerful fleets could be left dead in the water in a crisis.
The PLAN’s military and technological prowess against the US Navy in the field of submarine construction and anti-submarine warfare is progressing apace, and the “era of total US submarine dominance” over the People’s Republic of China is reaching its end.
That’s the conclusion reached by one of America’s top cited business newspapers in a piece focused on the Asian nation’s scientific and industrial advances for naval warfare. China, the paper pointed out, is gradually “narrowing” the gap between itself and the United States in the highly complex fields of submarine technology and undersea detection.
These developments not only threaten the Pentagon’s regional strategy of hemming China into its home ports, but could challenge US naval supremacy globally over the long term.
Earlier this year, for instance, research by the US Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute pointed to Chinese advances in efficient nuclear reactors, quiet-running pump-jet propulsion systems and internal quieting devices, the latter based on “imitative innovation” of Russian technology, predicting that the PLAN’s latest nuclear-powered subs will be much harder to track than before.
Additionally, analyses of satellite photos of the Huludao Shipyard in Liaoning, northeastern China taken last year showed the construction of sections of submarine hulls larger than anything US analysts have ever seen in a Chinese sub, along with what seemed to be plans to increase production capacity.
US media citing leaked US Navy intelligence already sounded the alarm about China’s impressive shipbuilding capacity this past fall, which at 23.2 million tons per year, compared with 100,000 tons per year in the US, gives the People’s Republic the ability to build warships at a rate some 200 times greater than the US in a pinch.
On top of that, the PLAN’s rapid construction of a vast network of underwater sensors in the South China Sea and other areas along the Chinese coast known as the “Underwater Great Wall”, to look out for sub, surface warship and aerial activity, means that the Pentagon will find it more difficult to place its warships, subs and aircraft in areas around the Asian nation. The Underwater Great Wall’s construction is reportedly nearing its completion, and includes a vast network of passive and active sonar sensors, plus remote controlled underwater and surface drones which can look out for enemy activity.
China is reportedly also “getting better” at finding silent-running US attack and cruise missile subs sneaking around near its home waters, combining buoy and drone-based monitoring with the use of patrol aircraft and helicopters, for example.
In addition are the PLAN’s growing number of exercises with Russia, which, it can be assumed not only increases the Chinese Navy’s ability to coordinate with its northern neighbor in the event of an emergency, but allows it to learn from the Russian Navy’s half century-plus year experience as a major global naval power rivaled only to the US.
“The implications for the US and our Pacific allies will be profound,” former US Navy officer Christopher Carlson said, pointing to the headaches the US Navy will face, and the additional resources it will need, to locate and keep track of China’s new generation of quiet-running nuclear subs.
Strategically, the outlet noted, maneuvers that the US once took for granted, like the ability to approach close China’s home shores, will now no longer be a given, with the PLAN’s nuclear-powered attack subs able to pick off approaching American warships before they could reach Taiwan in a crisis, for example.
On top of that is the Chinese sub-based ballistic missile threat to the US homeland –a threat Washington has long been used to meting out, but not experiencing itself, in relation to the Asian giant.
“Finding a boat this quiet is going to be really hard,” Carlson said of the Chinese sub threat, predicting the new Chinese boats will probably be about as quiet as the Project 971 Shchuka-B (NATO reporting name Akula, or “Shark”) class fourth generation nuclear-powered attack subs which the Soviet Union and then Russia started fielding in the 1980s and 1990s.
China’s fleet of 79 submarines includes at least 16 nuclear-powered attack and ballistic missile subs, including six Type 093 (NATO reporting name Shang class) attack subs and six Type 094 (NATO reporting name Jin) ballistic missile boats operating “near-continuous” patrols between Hainan Island and the South China Sea. But Carlson warned that the Asian nation could build up to triple the current US rate averaging 1.2 subs per year.
Costly as Aircraft Carriers, Difficult to Build
“Submarine-building is the pinnacle of technological excellence in economics and industry, and only a few countries have mastered the technologies which China has now broken into – France, Britain, the Soviet Union/Russia, and the United States,” Vasily Dandykin, a veteran Russian military analyst and retired Russian Navy Captain 1stRank, told Sputnik.
Several factors account for the US’ slowing pace when it comes to the construction of new submarines, according to the observer, starting with Washington’s decision to rest on its laurels after the end of the Cold War, to the drop in the number of high-class specialists in the field.
“The downtime” in the US’ submarine-related programs resulted from “complacency after the collapse of the Soviet Union,” when “not just America, but also Europe rested on their laurels,” according to Dandykin. “The Americans have the world’s largest military budget, which exceeds those of all other countries in the world. That means that somewhere they got carried away with such gigantic and expensive projects which did not justify their cost,” the analyst said, pointing to out of control spending on novelties like the $8 billion-per ship Zumwalt class of destroyers.
“There were a lot of such projects that sucked up a lot of money. And now it turns out that all of these experiments boil down to the fact that they’re 10 years behind Russia in the creation of a new fourth-generation strategic nuclear submarine,” made possible, according to the analyst, thanks to the backlog of revolutionary Soviet sub designs that Russian builders have been able to develop and build on.
“The ‘downtime’ that occurred had an impact in this area, not just with submarines, but the construction of the surface fleet, the entire American fleet. Here, without a doubt, China’s pace has been impressive, first and foremost in terms of the construction of large ships for the surface fleet. But I think they will push themselves and try to build up their nuclear submarine fleet as quickly as possible,” Dandykin predicted.
As far as China’s subs themselves go, Dandykin pointed out that for the moment, the majority of the PLAN’s fleet still consists of diesel-electric subs, and for them to reach the same technological level as the US, as they have already done when it comes to ships like universal landing ships and destroyers, will take time. The PLAN’s current nuclear-powered ballistic missile-launching subs belong to the second generation at best, in the retired naval officer’s estimation, and the newest efforts are aimed at the creation of third-generation vessels.
Accordingly, Dandykin believes US efforts to hype up the “Chinese threat” are “a little disingenuous,” and designed mainly to lobby for the allocation of even more resources for US sub-building efforts – a titanic effort equivalent, more or less, to the construction of an aircraft carrier in both technological and financial terms.
Surreal. Uncanny. Deja vu. That’s how I felt as I looked down on Southeast Asia from my seat aboard an airplane. The feelings intensified the longer I was there. While my friends made me feel so very welcome, even in my time alone the feeling never left me.
I began the first leg of my long journey back home by crying into my teacup in a cafe in Changi Airport. My heart felt heavy. I was glad to go home to my daughter but if she’d been with me on the trip I’m not sure I’d have returned to the U.S. willingly.
I have said that when I die I want my ashes to be scattered in China, because America is the place of my birth but China holds my heart. There’s something about the Asian region that draws me deeply. I have no Asian background or ancestry so I can’t rationalize it. It’s just how I felt.
I was fired after 11 years in a PR firm. I never clicked with the owner, and the feeling was mutual. I loved my colleagues, got along well with everyone, and consider them friends to this day.
I had just come off of a very trying time related to a proposal I was writing, had slept little, was burned out and mentioned to a colleague that I wasn’t sure I belonged there anymore.
Soon afterward, the boss took me into his office and said nobody wanted to work with me and that we had just lost a client that reduced our budget. His second in command sat through this with his head in his hands the whole time. He helped me clean out my office the next day.
There were other things going on at the firm. The owner was advancing in age and had promised a succession plan. He never delivered. One by one, after my firing, everyone quit. His firm, started in the mid-80s and one of the most prominent in the city, was done.
Two people told me that my firing was the trigger that made people start thinking about whether they wanted to be there anymore. I can’t take the credit or the blame for what happened, but the exodus was fast and devastating.
The public image of a celebrity can often be quite different from their true character. Take Ellen Degeneres, for example. On her show and in interviews, she appears to be a lovable, down-to-earth aunt-like figure. However, there have been numerous accounts from staff and crew members claiming that she is actually a nightmare to work with and a terrible person. So, which version is the truth?
Then there’s Sean Penn, who was once in a relationship with Madonna. It has been alleged that he kidnapped and raped her during the 80s. Additionally, Penn has been involved in some truly awful activities throughout his life. On the flip side, he is also the CEO of a large charity and engages in humanitarian work.
Another celebrity, Mark Wahlberg, is often seen as an extraordinary role model and a decent guy. However, it is important to note that he blinded a Vietnamese man during a fight and is a high school dropout. Please note that the mention of being a high school dropout does not imply that it automatically makes someone a terrible person, but it is worth considering when evaluating their status as a role model.
Tim Allen, known for his lovable and funny dad roles, has a dark side. Despite making people laugh out loud with his jokes, he has been described as a severe asshole who disrespects those around him. Furthermore, he was caught smuggling a kilo of cocaine in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and served time for it.
On the other hand, we have Danny Trejo, who was once involved in drug running for a cartel and had a long history of violence and addiction. However, he has transformed himself into a humble and honest man who actively tries to steer kids away from his former lifestyle. In person, he is charming and genuine.
Slave nations like Germany and Japan wrap themselves around US and western economic orbit. And the U.S. increase interest it destroy their banks and industry. Not China. China is in its own stable orbit. Today the U.S. interest is between 3–5% and China stays under 1% or so. It do its own thing.
US banks are dropping like flies. China’s bank is loaded with Cash. Chinese citizen on average save 35% of their income in Chinese banks. The U.S. citizens meanwhile saved in average less than 4%. So every year the Chinese add another 6–7 trillion dollars into their wealth and funds.
On FDI if the west reduce other nations made up for it and China’s own investment is so humongous. FDI from west means nothing.
I grew up in the USA. In high school, the lunch period was 25 minutes. On a normal day I washed down three peanut butter sandwiches and half a dozen cookies with a quart of milk and headed to the break room.
At least my parents enforced a family sit-down dinner, though it didn’t last long either.
My eating behaviour in college and working part time jobs was not any better, though the food choices were smarter and more varied.
When I started working in sales after college, I graduated to fast food eaten in the car.
At restaurants, servers were all over me, trying to turn the table in 45 minutes or less.
For me, eating was like putting gas in my car. Get it over and move on to the rest of life.
Then I moved to Germany. It was a shock. The canteen served excellent full hot meals and everyone took their time eating, chatting (but not about work), and taking turns buying coffee for the table.
It was impossible to get out of a sit-down restaurant in under 90 minutes without pushing the staff.
Dinner at friends was a four-hour affair.
I learned to love food and the community of sharing it with others. It wasn’t uncommon for less formal outdoor restaurants to seat me with other diners. I met dozens of fascinating people in that manner.
Ten years later I moved to France and learned that the French take mealtime even more seriously than the Germans. Employers even subsidise the canteen or pay part of the meal vouchers for each worker.
I think this question might be better phrased if it asked “What are the influences of culture on food?”
While the food does vary from country to country, I have little trouble in Europe to eat exactly what I ate in the USA. That’s why I don’t think it’s the food that matters.
Instead I think it’s the value people place on taking the time to savour their meals and those they share them with.
Zelenogradsk: What does a Russian city of CATS look like?
They are literally everywhere: occupying benches at observation decks, sitting next to tourists at restaurant terraces, strolling along pedestrian streets and (alright, fine) allowing you to take photos of them. Let’s pay them a little visit?
You can definitely call the small city of Zelenogradsk (pop. 16,000) in Kaliningrad Region the “cat capital” of Russia. Everything there is dedicated to these furry animals, from souvenirs to… traffic lights!
The many cats of this city will gladly show a tourist the best photo spots (and the best lunch spots!). But, how did it come to this?
Zelenogradsk (Cranz until 1946) is an old resort city at the shore of the Baltic Sea. Cats usually like to settle in such seaside towns, closer to fishermen, fish and vacationers. But, in Zelenogradsk, they have become a real attraction of the city.
According to legend, centuries ago, cats saved the city from rodents that were destroying their food supply and spreading disease. Caring for stray cats is the locals’ way of expressing gratitude.
Cats have always been living in Zelenogradsk. But, it was only recently that the city itself became the “cat capital”. It all started with the Murarium Museum in an old 1905 water tower. Local inhabitant Irina Klochkova decided to set up an exhibition hall for her cat statuette collection in the unused tower in 2012.
Real cats also live in the museum, with ginger-furred ‘Semyon Semyonovich’ chief among them. He became the prototype for the first museum souvenirs. ‘Murarium’ gained a lot of popularity among tourists; soon after, a lot of everything “cat-themed” began to appear in the city.
As soon as you visit, you’ll immediately notice an incredible amount of cat graffiti on buildings. Souvenir stores, on every corner it seems, sell anything from keychains and magnets to shopping bags and mugs with cats on them.
The city’s central street, Kurortny Prospekt, even has mini-benches for cats, little traffic lights with flashing cats, as well as vending machines where you can buy cat food. The city administration even has the position of cat chief, a cat caretaker. Their responsibilities include feeding and taking care of cats.
And for those tourists who decide to have lunch on an open terrace of any cafe, just know you won’t be able to so in peace and quiet! The local cats will always investigate and will not be against the idea of sharing a meal with you.
By the way, there are plenty of dogs in the city, as well, but they seemingly maintain a neutrality with the cats. There are literally no fights or altercations to speak of these days.
There are two approaches to an answer, one superficial.
I’ll begin with the superficial.
Democracy, or one man one vote, is practiced by the Chinese. They have found the process is good at selecting leaders from small groups that work or live closely together. In fact, this is how the President is selected among the Politburo, and so on.
Unfortunately, one man one vote can and has been hijacked, particularly if money and power enters the equation. There are innumerable tales of village/town leadership seizing power through the “democratic process” and terrorizing “voters” for years on end.
When groups grow too large, voting among strangers can lead to undesirable outcomes.
That’s the modern Chinese experience.
Unfortunately, “Western democracy” isn’t just voting systems. It is a system of values and beliefs built on the foundation of western prosperity. For the past 5–600 years, it has been the absolute dominance in technology that has kept the West on top. That is how the top 12% of humanity today maintain radically different standards of living from the rest of the 88.
Until the emergence of China, only willing acolytes of the “Western model” made the leap into the first world, leaving has-beens by the wayside. All of them, to a fault, adopted Western-style constitutions, governments, legislation and thoroughly reformed society, in order to qualify for membership into the “globalized world”. In return, their economies boomed, powered by export-led demand from the first world.
Along came China, which is distinctly different, especially in the post-Soviet age of “the end of history”. Unfortunately, Communist China has succeeded wildly, way beyond the imagination of the “last man”.
Herein lies the rub. Chinese leaders had enough self confidence decades ago that the Western highway to prosperity wasn’t exclusive. Today, Chinese society is increasingly convinced their leaders were right, because they are living the best times in the sum history of Chinese civilization, a realized boast that reverberates through 4 millennia and >100 generations.
Western prosperity in the 21st century is no longer the shining city on the hill, cities of the future one can only dream of being teleported back home. A Chinese tourist visiting NYC, London, Paris and Berlin will be nonplussed by the sights, and perhaps repulsed by the smell and experience. Chinese cities have the same modern hardware, and services is rapidly catching up. And Chinese cities are evolving rapid improvement in quality of life metrics, while the west is stagnating, or worse, regressing.
The Chinese will go, that’s “Western democracy”, “in God We Trust”, and “all men created equal”?
Thanks, but no thanks.
Communism has our vote, because we live and breathe its outcomes.
Ukr Hard Day: Avdeyevka Cauldron, Kherson Bridgehead Cut Off, Wilders Wins; Biden BRICS Gaza Plan
She came to the surgery OPD by mistake on a day when our Plastic Surgery OPD was closed.
She had her face covered with a dupatta. I was immediately aware that she had some disfigurement that she was trying to conceal but it was only when I saw her treatment card that I realised what the reason behind it was.
I read the entire card and slowly looked up at her. She was looking at me with one eye while she kept the rest of her face covered.
“I was asked to come after 4 weeks. Here I am.” She told me quietly.
“Yes, I see it written here, ma’m, but our plastic surgery OPDs are on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. I am afraid, you’ll have to come back tomorrow.”
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
“Can’t you or the doctors here do anything about this?”
“We can but we are not plastic surgeons. We are not experts and we are not the best people to help you.”
“No one can help me, doctor. You know it.”
I had no answer to that.
“If there’s anything else I can do for you…” I said.
“What can you do? My life is ruined. All I do is travel between my home, the hospital and the court. The last few of weeks my life have been hell. The pain has been unbearable. I can’t even look into the mirror anymore. What do you think you CAN do? Can you get me to look like before?”, she said, her eye moist and a hint of desperation in her voice.
I was trying hard to act professional.
I wanted to say that I was sorry that this happened to her. I wanted to tell her that I felt a burning hatred for the person or persons who did this to her. I wanted to tell her that she shouldn’t give up because her life wasn’t over.
Yet, I didn’t say anything. Everything that came into my head began to sound empty as I was about to say it out loud. My words all seemed so woefully inadequate to offer any kind of assurance to her.
That’s why I was trying to be calm and professional. No pity, no sadness, no anger. I was just trying to do what I was there for: my job which was to try and help her.
“I’ll try to call the Plastic Surgery resident to see if he can come here and take a look at you. I can’t promise that he will but I will give him a call.”
“Thank you.” She said quietly.
Nodding, I took out my phone to call the resident.
“I shouldn’t have spoken like that to you.” She said, looking straight at me.
“It’s completely fine.” I said immediately. The last thing I wanted was for her to feel bad for me.
“No, it’s not. I know what it feels like to be spoken to like this, especially if you haven’t done anything to deserve it.”
“Really, ma’m, you do not need to apologise at all. It’s okay-”
“You know, what hurts the most? Before this I was recently-”
Married? Did the husband abandon her? That was the first thought that came to my head.
“-promoted. I was a receptionist in a famous hotel. I was good at my job. People speak to us rudely all the time but I was really good at handling them. There wasn’t a single complaint against me to my manager in the one and a half years that I had the job.”
She paused, looking down at her feet.
“It’s all gone now. They won’t let me work with this…face. It doesn’t matter how well I handle our customers if they can’t handle my face.”, she said, in a voice that was so matter-of-fact that my heart felt like it was being stabbed.
This was a woman who had been serious about her job. She had been excited about her future. She had been independent. The first thing she told me about her life was that she had lost the job she had worked so hard at.
I don’t know why but this case affected me so much more than other cases. Medically, there exist even more severe cases in which acid attacks have caused complete blindness, paralysis or in the inability to eat or swallow.
I know, of course, that you can’t quantify suffering and everyone has their own battles but this one…this one made me want to stop doing my work and go cry in a corner.
I forced myself to look away and called the resident. I managed to convince him to come and examine her.
“He’ll be here in fifteen minutes. Please wait outside.”, I said with difficulty because I felt a lump in my throat.
“Thank you.”, she said softly and left the room.
When you throw acid on someone’s face and they survive the attack, you take from them much of what we consider “life”. You take away choices, opportunities, self-respect and throw them into a world of such suffering that they have never known before.
My grandfather was once a lightweight boxing champ. He was healthy most of his life, but like everyone, he grew old. At 90 years old, though, he still liked to go dancing. He took his girlfriend to their elder community’s weekly dance. We went to join them for dinner and just visit them a while.
While I was up getting them plates from the buffet, two scummy men came in. They had been drinking and were looking for some old people to bully – no joke. They were in their late 30s/early 40s. They stopped at my grandpa’s table and started talking about his girlfriend. My grandpa stood up and told them to leave. I looked over and saw this jerk spit on the floor and shove my 90 year old grandpa.
I saw my grandpa stumble backwards against the wall, and I dropped the food tray and started moving towards him. It felt like slow motion.
Before I could get there, I saw my grandpa push off the wall and punch the guy square in the jaw. The man landed on his butt and slid backwards nearly all the way across the room! No one could believe what we saw, especially not the two creeps. His friend went over and helped him up, and everyone watched them leave with their tails between their legs.
I finally went back and got the food for them, and we sat and talked about what happened while they ate. After a bit, the two idiots came back with the police. They pointed by grandpa out to the officers.
The police didn’t believe their story, and we all acted like we didn’t know what they were talking about.
In last two decades hundreds of millions of Chinese have travelled overseas. Annually about 130 million Chinese travel outside of their country. So by now most of them may have realised that most of the rest of the world is very backward and not as advanced as they used to think.
And secondly they have their own continent sized country to travel and explore and will probably take a lifetime to explore fully. And every kind of tourist related attractions are within their own country be it tourist spots, beaches, deserts, cultural and historical sites, valleys, grasslands, snow and glaciers means in short every experience and to say the least their excellent infrastructure that makes travelling within China indeed a cakewalk.
If a Muslim unknowingly eats pork it isn’t a terrible problem. That doesn’t mean they won’t be upset though.
Regardless of how they feel about the pork, they will probably be more upset with you. Letting them unknowingly eat pork as a joke is a dick move of the highest order. I would recommend that you never tell them, if you want to maintain the relationship you have with them. If you tell them and laugh about it, no one is going to blame them for hating you forever. Others might join their camp.
Like I said, it’s a dick move, so proceed at your own risk.
Hoo boy. This is going to be one rough ride for humanity.
If we act fast, there is a chance that our species might survive for the long term, but we’re going to have to do things quickly. As soon as the Earth starts to move away from the Sun, things are going to cool off. A lot depends on exactly the trajectory, but even with a conservative estimate, we’re facing a snowball Earth scenario within a matter of years, when the surface of the planet can no longer support liquid water. It won’t take long for everything living on the surface to die.
However, not all hope is lost. The oceans will freeze from the surface downward, and as they freeze over they will in fact insulate the deeper layers. It could take hundreds of thousands of years before the oceans freeze solid, meaning some life may still manage to hold on in the deeper parts of the oceans for millennia, particularly where there is active volcanism going on, keeping things (relatively) warm. In theory, given enough time, we might be able to construct underwater habitats in the deep oceans as a refuge for humanity.
Another option is to simply go underground. On average, the temperature increases by about 25C for every kilometer we go down into the ground. Even when the surface temperatures have plummeted to -200C (when we’ve wandered out past Pluto), we “only” have to dig down a handful of kilometers before we can bask in the relative heat from the heart of our planet.
That heat from the planet’s core is what might ultimately provide the salvation for the species. While the rest of the energy sources we have available to us are ultimately based on solar radiation and will be forfeit once we’ve drifted from the Sun, our planet’s core is powered by radioactive decay and will keep on cooking for billions of years to come. We can harness this either directly via fission reactors, or indirectly through geothermal energy sources.
So here’s the scenario we might enact to provide for the continuation of humanity.
First, we determine what capacity we have for tunneling down into the crust and excavating areas large enough to create underground settlements. Perhaps the Boring Company will be in high demand in this scenario! Governments across the world pool their resources and a number of candidate sites around the globe are selected. Access to existing geothermal energy sources might be a good starting point.
Then we start digging. Temporary “camps” are excavated at shallower depths while digging proceeds ahead for future movements. In the meantime, each of these future colonies is prepared with resources that they’ll need to survive. Deep underground, some of the challenges will be oxygen and clean water; however, with artificial sunlight and proper preparation it should be possible to grow crops even underground. We’ll probably have to say goodbye to eating meat as raising animals for food won’t be an efficient use of resources, though we might keep some animals around for the sake of having animals.
At some point there’s going to be some kind of selection process for who gets to go down and survive. This won’t be pretty. Most of us will be left on the surface to freeze to death. But once it’s done, the selected groups can descend into the bowels of the Earth and begin a new subterranean existence.
Would it succeed? It’s hard to say. They have to dig deep enough, and that presents dangers in and of itself. Colonies could be destroyed by seismic activity that collapses them. In those kinds of close quarters, a disease outbreak could prove fatal to the whole group. Issues with food supply or water supply could doom a group. There are many ways in which any underground colony could fail, and it is almost a given some of them would.
But with enough luck, persistence and hard work, some of them might make it, and over the generations adapt to this new lifestyle. Maybe they’d even thrive to the point they could send excursions back out to the surface, exploring the frozen wasteland, travelling across the ice to visit other underground colonies. Maybe even once again find ways to build ships to leave the planet and try to find someplace nicer to take the family, so to speak.
From the Bayou Crawfish Louisianne
Yield: 4 to 6 generous servings
Ingredients
2 tablespoons (1/4 stick) butter
1/2 cup chopped andouille sausage
3/4 cup chopped bell pepper (can mix the colors)
1/2 large onion, chopped
1 tablespoon Italian seasoning
1/2 to 3/4 cup whipping cream
1 pound crawfish tails
1 quart peanut oil
4 to 6 catfish fillets (2 to 3 ounces each)
Egg wash (egg white, water, milk)
Seasoned flour
Seasoning to taste
Cajun seasoning, pepper, red pepper and garlic powder
Instructions
In a small saucepan, melt butter. Add andouille, peppers, onions and Italian seasoning and sauté until tender (about 5 minutes.) Add mushrooms just before completion.
Add whipping cream, and reduce the sauce over medium heat.
Add crawfish, and cook for 3 minutes. Adjust seasoning.
Heat oil in a large saucepan.
Dredge fish in egg wash and then season with flour.
Make decisions for yourself and do not follow the opinions or actions of others.
Have a clear sense of who you are and what you stand for.
Spend time reflecting on your thoughts and emotions and deeply understand yourself.
Be capable of taking care of yourself and do not rely on others for support.
Enjoy spending time alone and find it more fulfilling than being with others.
Have a few close friends or family members and do not rely on the need for an extensive social network.
Enjoy exploring ideas and concepts and be comfortable contemplating complex topics.
Do not seek validation from others and be comfortable relying on yourself.
Have a unique perspective and approach to life and be confident going against the crowd.
Do not conform to societal norms or expectations and march to the beat of your drum.
The Chinese warship sonar incident
This mature and analytical write-up by John Menadue, November 23 is very constructive and logical.
John Menadue is the Founder and Editor in Chief of Pearls and Irritations. He was formerly Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet under Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, Ambassador to Japan, Secretary of the Department of Immigration and CEO of Qantas.
…
“What a feast of anti-China stories we have had again from the Coalition and our media over the incident between HMAS Toowoomba and a Chinese PLA-N destroyer.
The whole issue really looks to be overblown – and seeded by some in the Sinophobia school who are worried about where Prime Minister Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong may be headed. The idea of “stabilisation” scares them, so they react by promoting some destabilisers.
The proposition that the Chinese warship was directed by Beijing – let alone President Xi – to initiate such “aggressive” action beggars belief. Like the ‘spy’ balloon exercise, where it seems clear enough that President Xi initially knew little about the whole thing.
Our ‘spooks’ depend on the CIA for about 90% of their overseas information and the Pentagon is building a network in our Department of Defence. I would very much doubt whether Albanese and Wong really know what ‘information’ the CIA and the Pentagon are feeding into our spooks.
The US expects that a pliant ally like Australia will do what it is told. It is concerned at recent events and prefers that we do not stabilise our relations with China. So this incident is a great opportunity for some destabilisation. And our poorly informed media tag along as always.
Given the unsurprising PLA comments the chances of misunderstanding the message or even miscommunication would have to rate high. If the PLA ship had been shadowing the RAN ship, which then decided to stop dead in the water to check for nets, would the Commander of the PLA ship not be a bit suspicious about what the RAN was up to and activate some of his intel alerts including special sonar to try to find out more? In any event presumably he would have had some of his sonar devices running while he was sailing anyway? Even if the PLA just happened on the RAN in the middle of the sea (electronically of course) would its initial reaction not be one of suspicion?
We probably will never get the real story of the actual communications between the two ships, but language problems cannot be excluded.
But Albanese and Marles (again and again) have been panicked into hasty responses for which we will pay. Marles should have tried to hose things down, but he invariably sings from the US song sheet. Albanese should stick to the line of not commenting in detail on his private conversations with world leaders. Blinken did this repeatedly over questions about the Xi-Biden talk. If necessary, the government can call in the Chinese Ambassador at Secretary level to make the point.
It is strange why Marles would want to play this up right now. The incident was not in the SCS but in Japan’s EEZ heading towards Japan. This could be in the contested area of the East China Sea, south of Okinawa.
It is also not clear what UN sanctions RAN was monitoring unless they were part of the regular monitoring of UN sanctions against North Korea. We have been doing that in the Sea of Japan further north.
These incidents should be sorted out by military to military communications and not as a stick for those who want to destabilise our improving relationship with China.
We would be more concerned if this incident occurred in waters adjacent to Australia and not in waters adjacent to China, which is already encircled by scores of US military bases. China would understandably be very sensitive about what happens in its proximity.
In any event, this incident is minor compared with the aggressive things we do that are hostile to China. RAAF P8 aircraft operating out of the Philippines drop Sonar buoys in the SCS to monitor Chinese submarines. This is not for the defence of Australia but to support the US in a possible conflict with China over Taiwan.
Our media have shown no interest in this issue. It does not fit the Western ‘China threat’ narrative that our White Man’s Media works so hard to construct and maintain, and so is ignored.”
If you’ve worked retail long enough, even if you’re amazing, you have one of these.
I work retail pharmacy. I had a woman come up to the sales counter with her adult daughter, wanting to buy a large quantity of Sudafed, but within the legal limit. Both of them were planning to buy, and they happened to mention that they were buying it for the woman’s mother, both of them. This is illegal, as in my state you must purchase it for yourself or your minor child. You actually sign an electronic document stating so.
I apologize to the women and tell them I can’t complete the transaction, and explain why, that it is against state and federal law.
Immediate attitude, along the lines of “Who do you think you are, you low born classless person to tell me and my daughter, with our bleach blonde hair and snooty attitudes ‘no!’”
The mother demands to speak with the manager, who isn’t there, we just have a staff pharmacist who’s witnessed the whole thing. She tells the woman that I can complete the sale.
I stare at her for a second before asking the pharmacist if she intends to pay my legal fees to reinstate my pharmacy tech liscense, and tell the pharmacist that if she wants to process the transaction she can, but that I WILL NOT.
She demands my register login and codes, because she’s not a regular pharmacist at my store. I refuse to give them to her, as that is a fireable offense.
The customer is staring at us, red faced and ready to burst, and demands I listen to the pharmacist, then demands I page store management when I explain that the pharmacist cannot compel me to break the law.
I page store management, and my favorite assistant manager comes over and asks what’s going on. By this point, the woman is using abusive language, and exclaims “This f*ggot won’t sell me Sudafed that is for me!”
At that point the manager raises an eyebrow and tells the woman she’s going to have to move her car.
Woman asks why.
“Because our parking is for customers only. You need to leave now. Our customers know they can’t talk to people like that.”
The woman throws a shrieking fit, shoving over a display of medication… which her adult daughter stops to pick up, apologizing the whole time.
The pharmacist in question got written up by corporate for an Ethics violation, and when my Pharmacy Manager told me I should just turn my ears off and not listen to conversations at the register and do my job, he got an Ethics violation that has left him stuck as a pharmacy manager.
The woman emailed the corporate office, and I got to see the reply which was basically ‘We’re sorry you had that experience, but our stores are committed to following state and federal law’ and they attached the laws in question, highlighted.
It was nice to be vindicated and defended for once, instead of thrown under that well known bus.
I was in a hospital, here at Rome, to visit a friend, and when I was going away I saw two American girls, one could hardly walk because she had fell and hurted badly her leg. I helped them to call someone to bring a wheel chair and they went to emergency. I went with them to help because they didn’t speak italian well. I asked why they didn’t call for an ambulance and they said they didn’t want t to spend too much money. They were worried about how much they would have to pay at the hospital too. I explained them, in Italy, the ambulance is free, and so the hospital. Even if she would have to stay there for days or weeks. No one in Italy could dare to ask a girl with a broken leg for money. Nobody could leave her without medical care even if the didn’t have money.
They couldn’t believe me . They continued asking if the hospital was going to send bills later. If they could pay later in installments.
The girls wanted to ask the administrative employee too, because they wanted to be sure. He gave them the same answer and they were very surprised.
Later the girls left the hospital, one had a cast on her leg but they had big, beautiful smiles!
Not me, but my mother. She was visiting the US for a ski holiday in New England and had a bad fall that resulted in a broken bone. As a result, she had to spend a bit of time in a hospital. Her stay was fortunately paid for by Canadian health insurance; can’t imagine how US citizens who don’t have or can’t afford coverage manage to pay for their care.
Anyway, I was curious to see what it cost after she got home, so she showed me the detailed bill. The total was shockingly high, no surprise, but one thing caught my eye. She’d been invoiced for 3X “helically wound cellulose absorbent matrix units” at $48 each. Curious, I contacted the hospital to ask what these could be. Can you guess?
They turned out to be rolls of bog-standard toilet paper, the number she was tracked as having consumed during her stay.
This was a Church of England (Christian) secondary school (ages 11-18) in the late ‘80s and the dress code was quite strict. Among the many rules was one that boys weren’t allowed to have long hair.
There was this old-fashioned teacher (Mr. Barabell) who’d been teaching there for ~30 years already by that point and was well-known for being strict but fair.
Anyway, there was this one boy (Luke) who decided that he wanted to grow long hair and he wasn’t going to let a stupid school rule stop him, and so he just let it grow. Initially he started getting comments from teachers about being “scruffy” etc. but eventually the situation came to a head in Mr. Barabell’s class:
A confrontation begins with the teacher telling Luke off— “There are school standards to maintain, “ and, “Does he think that he’s special, ” and so on. Well Luke—smart alec that he was—has a pre-prepared answer ready to go:
“But sir, Jesus had long hair didn’t he?“
As this point the class is completely silent waiting for a response, but instead of answering Mr. Barabell says, “Right, everyone come with me now,” and he turns and exits the class room. We all follow, including Luke, wondering what on Earth is going on.
Eventually we reach the school swimming pool and gather around. Then Mr. Barabell turns to Luke, points to the swimming pool and says, “Walk!”.
Luke is just standing there kind of shaking his head (knowing that he’s defeated) and the whole rest of the class is cracking up.
The teacher finishes with, “When you can walk on water, you can have long hair at school.”
Americans foolishly screamed and shout that they are the leader of the free world without ever questioning if it is even remotely true or not! Please don’t be angry or upset if I help you guys since I understand you can pretend to be free or even dare says you are ordained by god to spread democracy and freedom but you Americans are one of the least free country on earth.
Let me help you good American. So first I like to explain how unfree you guys are.
35% of you cannot get health care when you fall sick! The most basic of freedom is the freedom to see a doctor and get cure when you fall sick. At least 100 million Americans don’t have this basic of basics of freedom.
Next 1 million Americans are homeless and don’t have another basic of basics of freedom. The freedom to have a roof over their head.! They have to live in makeshift tents on the streets.
20% of Americans don’t have 500 dollars to their name and don’t know where their next meal is coming from! Surely everyone must have the freedom to have a hot meal to stay alive!
USA with about 4% of world population has 25% of the worlds prisoners population! Think about this my American friends, prisoners are certainly. Not free. Many of them coloured people thrown into jail for the slightest reason. How on earth can you keep a straight face to say U.S. is the leader of the free world. No one know!
In many cities in the U.S. one cannot go to certain parts of the inner city like the Queens in New York. As crimes are rampant. So normal innocent and good Americans like you have to avoid that part of America! Surely freedom means you can go to anywhere or any part of America.
Kids and parents suffers the mental turmoils daily for just going to school. Many got shot to death in schools, public places, cinemas and even in Capitol Hill! Is that freedom? Even your kids are not free to go to school without a random mass shooter lurking with military grade weapons to murder them! Is this freedom?
If you are not fortunate to have a white skin you could be necked to death in the bright daylight of even driving a good car may be be shot to death just for suspected of stealing the car! Everyday you live in fear of a white policeman! Is that freedom to live? Freedom to avoid death at the racist inclination of the white racist? Surely not.
Freedom means you can choose who you really want to be your leader. Only 30% choose Biden. Or 35% choose Trump! Why are they your president? Your system allowed 0.8% of the richest and most influential people to choose your candidates! Surely this is not political freedom. This is far from democracy. How on earth can you call yourself the “beacon of democracy” who in a sane mind can claim that?
Oh today you country stop the Americans from having access to best 5G technology, Smartphone, best EV’s, drones and others for some geopolitical nonsense! Is this freedom? Freedom to be deprived? Let me help you understand. You are deprived from buying a 10 bucks EV. And need to be charged once a week but you are not allowed to! You cannot buy your Tesla like for half the price! Just to support your too big to fail auto industry paying 100 million bonus doing shit for good Americans!
But to me EVs and Drones are just the top of the iceberg of your draconian and suicide policies that takes away the freedom of Americans like you. Think about Jullien Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden! Freedom? American is anything but free.
It was 2016 in Bruges, Belgium. I was with my parents and we had just hailed a cab that somehow turned into a ride-share with this British family.
All was well in the van until about three minutes in, when I heard the lady say: “These people look a bit funny, don’t they?”. I looked up to notice that they were talking about my family. In plain English.
I stayed silent as much as I could, as they went on discussing among themselves and chuckling over how we were so bundled up (It was in the middle of a freezing winter and I live in the freaking equator!) even though it wasn’t that cold for them, or how they couldn’t figure out where we’re from because apparently we didn’t look Chinese enough nor Middle Eastern enough for them (Answer: Neither – we’re Indonesian) and all. During the whole ride, they were mocking us.
My mother must’ve seen me giving them a death stare and asked if anything was wrong, in Indonesian. Topping it all off, they were of course chuckling at how my mom was talking really funny. I couldn’t stand it any more, so I answered my mom in English, making sure the British family heard me well:
“Yes there is a problem here. Some people actually still think that English isn’t a universal language by now, and think that it’s good fun to mock and make fun of other people just because of how they look”.
I spent the rest of the cab ride watching the blood drain from their faces. At least I was no longer the one being uncomfortable in that cab.
Feeling sad after making a decision doesn’t mean it was the wrong decision.
Life is not tiring. Wanting life to be a certain way but not having the confidence to make it that way, is tiring.
Self-awareness is realising that there is no opponent -you’re fighting against yourself.
Sometimes saying ‘goodbye’ doesn’t mean you don’t love something, it just means you love yourself too.
That lesson will repeat itself until you learn it.
If you keep one hand on your past and one hand on your future you’ll never have either. To embrace tomorrow, you must let go of yesterday.
The world starts and ends entirely inside your mind. No matter where you end up, no matter how rich, or successful you become, you won’t enjoy any of it if you get there at the expense of your mental health.
As a teenager, I worked in a gas station for a couple of years. A younger kid got hired who had some odd work habits. When the station owner would leave, the kid would just go sit down in the office. Meanwhile, I’d be pumping gas, changing oil, or mounting tires. I had no authority over this kid.
A few days after he was hired, I told the owner what was going on. An hour or two later the owner mentioned he was going home for an hour or two. He departed, the kid sat down in the office, while I finished doing an oil change and waited on customers at the pumps.
Ten minutes later, the boss walked out the alley where he’d parked his truck out of sight, and stood quietly in the shadows, watching me work, and the kid sitting on his butt. A few minutes later, the kid was fired. Word got around our small town pretty quickly, I don’t think this kid could find another job that summer.
Years ago I strained a tendon in my thumb. I went to one of those jenky quick service medical clinics to have it looked at and a person, who I assumed had some training in doctoring or nursing, prescribed me ibuprofen and put my hand in a brace.
I paid them like 50 bucks and went on my way.
A few weeks later I got a bill for the brace from a medical billing company in Texas. They assigned a cost of $750 to the brace, and only the brace, claimed to have billed my insurance for $450 and expect the rest from me. Of course, I sent them nothing, and the bills kept coming. The brace was essentially the same as one you’d buy at the drug store for about $35. It was nothing special and there was no way I was sending them any money. I tried to call them, but no one ever answered their phone.
Once my tendon healed, I put the brace in a box, along with a copy of their bill and mailed it to them. I never received anther bill afterwards.
In fact, there is no eternal empire in human history. From Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, Ottoman, Russia. The lifespan of any empire established by a civilization is limited. In other words, crashes are bound to happen.
But the difference between China and other empires is that most ancient empires collapse only once. Because the collapsed empire can never be rebuilt again. But China has such a magical power that no matter how it collapses, it will always be reunified after a period of time, and then climb to the peak again.
This picture shows the whole history of China. The crown represents peace and unity, and the sword represents division and war.
So much so that the opening sentence of the famous ancient Chinese novel “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms” reads: “The general trend of the world is that if it is divided for a long time, it will be united, and if it is united for a long time, it will be divided.”
Why China has such magic power, historians have many opinions.
One of the more widely recognized statements is this:
4,000 years ago, the Chinese were born on a land suitable for farming. Since the earliest civilized countries were established, they have been a typical agricultural civilization.
From the earliest recorded history of China, they have faced the threat from the north. That is the nomadic civilization galloping on the grasslands. In the early historical documents of Chinese dynasties, the invasion of nomadic civilization was recorded many times, and even the most brilliant Western Zhou Dynasty perished because of the invasion of nomadic civilization.
The ancestors of the Chinese discovered that the agricultural civilization, which is good at farming and construction, cannot compete with the nomadic civilization, which is good at riding and archery, in war. (Infantry can hardly defeat cavalry). But as long as they are united, they will become more powerful. If 1 person can’t defeat the enemy, then 3 people; if 3 people can’t, then 10 people. Since agricultural civilization can breed more wealth and population, once China is united, the nomads are no match at all.
In 221 BC, the Qin Empire unified China for the first time, defeated the Xiongnu in war, and built the Great Wall to keep them out of the cold north. The Han Empire went a step further and formed a professional army of hundreds of thousands of people, went on an expedition to the desert, and completely defeated the Xiongnu. A unified and strong state always protects its people from harm. And when the empire crumbles and divides, China becomes weak. For example, the Northern and Southern Dynasties and the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period were all like this. At this time, the enemy from the north invaded, the internal war was in chaos, and the society was dark. People cannot live a normal life, and starvation and death become the norm. Every round of imperial collapse and division in Chinese history will be accompanied by wars and a significant reduction in population. The lessons of history have engraved this truth deeply in the hearts of the Chinese people—unity is justice and light, and division is evil and darkness. The Chinese yearning for unity transcends history, time, religion, and nationality.
Therefore, the ultimate political goal of every careerist who wished to seize power in ancient China was the same: to unify the country and obtain the “sky destiny”. Only in this way can we gain the support of the people.
Imagine if in Europe, every German thought the German government was evil, the British thought the British government was dark, and the French thought the French government was corrupt. These governments should all be overthrown. As for the reason, there is only one: they don’t want to unify Europe, which is not the right direction.
What a terrible and incredible power this is, but the Chinese have such power.
I used to date an American. At the time I lived on an estate where to get out, you had to drive under a railway bridge arch. He got annoyed with having to wait for oncoming traffic to clear and demanded to know “why the hell didn’t they build this with two lanes?” I said it was built 150 years ago for stagecoaches, before cars were even invented. Americans forget how old England is.
I asked a cycle rickshaw driver in India if I could have a turn. “This’ll be as easy as riding a bicycle,” I thought.
Technically, that’s exactly what it is. Only that you’re pulling someone else’s weight as well. Or even that of several people.
His face had all those deep grooves from the harsh sun beating down on him all day. His arms and legs were as thin as twigs. His ribcage bulged through a sweat-drenched tanktop.
I was less than half his age and enjoyed the kind of nutrition he could only dream of.
“You’re a tourist,” he protested.
But I insisted and he sat on the vinyl seat in the back.
I mounted the driver’s seat brimming with confidence and pressed down on the pedal.
It didn’t even budge.
I stood up and pushed down with all my might.
The rickshaw squeaked forward a couple inches.
By this point, the driver was laughing hysterically.
I conceded defeat, we changed positions, and he sailed down the street with an ease I could not even begin to fathom.
And while he was no industry-disrupting maverick, he was solving a real problem—helping people get from A to B.
My view of manual laborers was forever changed.
I learned that technique always trumps strength.
And that every honest line of work deserves our utmost respect.
When I was a young boy, perhaps in second grade, we lived in Monroe , CT. It was a housing development that was being carved out of the forests, and was very nice. We only lived there for a year or so, before my father was transferred to Pittsburgh. We sold the place. Bad move, as the house ended up being worth millions of dollars.
Anyways, at that time in my life, I loved roaming the woods. All 7 years old, and it was a big part of my childhood.
I would often go into the homes being constructed with wire cutters and rip out the wiring and electronics for fun. Oh, that is, until my father had a talk with a building contractor. LOL.
But, you know what?
Yeah, what I most remember about that time was spending all day hiking and exploring, and then coming home to a nice big “sit down” dinner. These were often improved upon as I got older, but at that time, my mother was just getting into her “stride” and it was simple but delicious fare.
Meatloaf, roasts, soups, chicken, and the like. All very delicious and filling.
One of my fondest memories was the meat-laden spaghetti, with plain “wonder bread” on the side, and a nice large salad. Other popular meals consisted of pork chutney over rice, and submarine sandwich meals.
But it’s the spaghetti that I miss the most.
I used to take the bread, and butter both sides. Then, I would spoon the spaghetti into the bread, making a fine thick sandwich. Oh, I was so simple and silly then.
I guess the MM audiences would go “ohhh yuck” at this story. But for me, nah. it’s good memories and good times.
I was a young, recently divorced, single mother of a 3 year old and one Christmas my grandmother gave me a HUGE box to open. In that box I found a little bit of everything! It had paper towels. Toilet paper, cleaning supplies, canned goods and many other items that you may want or need for your home and pantry! I was so grateful as it is pretty costly when you run out of everything especially all at the same time and because my Grandmother had no money she said she added everything a little at a time all throughout the year in order to help me the best way she could. My Grandmother was the sweetest, kindest Lady you’d ever know. I loved her with my whole heart!
I made $7.50 per hour for 3 years before I got a sweet .50 raise that catapulted me no where.
And I only got that because the lady was guilted into it.
I was told, as most people are, if you work hard and prove yourself, you will make more in time. Well that never really happened.
When I first started I just answered phones and worked the register. Then I got my vehicle inspectors license and begin inspecting vehicles. And answering phones and the register.
The business was a window tinting business, primarily, and they tinted vehicles, homes and commercial buildings. Soon I was prepping jobs for tint and doing bids for residential and commercial jobs. And doing well, I might add!
Then helping with the books. Opening, closing, picking up and dropping off customers. Driving out of town to pick up materials. And finally tinting commercial windows.
And I worked, often 80 hours per week. For $8 per hour. Which is a problem because at a certain point, over time starts to hurt. The extra would be taken out in taxes and the effort is not worth it.
Let me also mention that I didn’t have a car and used a company truck for company business but my commute to and from work everyday was just over 3 hours. I woke up at 4 to be there at 8:30. (Hitchhiked, rode 2 buses and walked…both ways…yep)
When I inquired about a raise she kept putting me off. She’d think about it. Couldn’t afford it, etc. Finally she said to me…
”It’s not like you need more money. It’s not like you have a family to take care of, house or car. It’s not like you have any bills.”
I will never ever, forget that. Ever.
Apparently it never occurred to her that I didn’t have any of those things because I was poor. And it was totally ok with her if I never had anything because it benefitted her.
And I had other issues with the place like rarely getting a day off and it would be the end of the world if I took a break at work because only smokers are allowed breaks. Twenty breaks, a hundred, doesn’t matter, because you need those cigarette breaks!
“If you don’t like it, then go work somewhere else.”
When she told me that.
I quit.
She was so certain I would come back because I had no prospects. Two weeks later, a friend told me she was looking for me, she wanted me to come back.
Why, you might ask??
Because she can’t find any decent help (read: people who’ll work for nothing!). And she wanted me to come back for…
Wait for it…
$8.50!!
See, I needed to understand that she could not afford more than that.
I told her. “No thanks.”
Then she called me selfish. She was struggling to find help and I didn’t care. Selfish!!
She ended up having to hire 4 other people. And for the next 5 years she contacted me off and on to try to get me to come back.
“Ok, how about $9! Be reasonable!!”
So on and so forth until she got to $12 over time.
I can’t honestly say I was irreplaceable. I can say that she needed a lot more help after I left. I can also say the business did not exist the fifth year after I’d gone.
I learned a very important lesson working for her. I needed to look out for myself. Work hard but only stay so long, based on the rate, frequency and size of raises. And all the while, always keep my ear to the ground for other opportunities.
I need to look out for me with the same ferocity the companies look out for their own interests.
In 100 years 5% of those who use the U.S. dollar will remember how it look. And 15% of the nations who bought weapons in 2023 will still use weapons from the U.S. still! In 100 years US economy will be lying at best a distant 3rd behind China and India by a very long way. China will be roughly 5–6 times the U.S. size and even India will be close to double that of the USA!
The G7 at best is a fifth the size on BRiCS economy. The U.S. will be broken up into some 3–4 nations. And Democrats and Republicans are close to the full scale or outright U.S. civil war 2.0 in 2123! The U.S. and some 4–5 die hard dogs like UK, Australia and Canada will meet and still talk shit. But no one bother, no one even listen.
China has made the world 10 times more prosperous and 20 times more peaceful by then. Talking about the U.S. in 2123 is like talking about the former Yugoslavia today. By 2023 the U.S. would have long collapse and implode it’s economy and a full scale fight between Democrats and Republicans and also between the whites and coloured and also between the rich and poor has destroyed the so call liberal democracy.
In 100 years, China is selling moon and space tourism, become the leader in autonomous vehicles, supersonic planes, biggest ports and airports world wide. China will be in the business of hypersonic weapons, quantum computers. Artificial intelligence, Bio technology and nuclear technologies. A far cry from selling cheap T-shirts and plastic toys in 1980! By 2123. China has built an alternative Panama and Suez Canal 5 times its size! And a bridge to cross Russia to Alaska!
BRICS by that time consist of 50 nations. And gets supports from 190 out of 200 nations. Meanwhile as many as 10 million are living in tents homeless in the U.S. suburbs. Random mass shootings incidents happened at least 50 times a day in the U.S. killing roughly 100 people a day in the U.S. Confederate flag flies more widely than the Stars and Stripes in the U.S. in 2123.
China has just given warnings on visiting certain parts of the USA no different from the warnings of visiting Ethiopia or Yemen in 2000. That is what is likely happening in 2123 a hundred years from now. But the U.S. still scream liberal democracy like a 80 years old lone hippie!
My husband and I are avid cruisers, which means food, food, and more food. That being said, I typically eat what I choose, save the occasional pick of something that is just not good. I usually eat breakfast alone, as he is still sleeping, and I sit and people watch in the buffet. My breakfast is always the same: oatmeal with fruit, some scrambled eggs, and a couple of pieces of ham or Canadian bacon. The same as I eat at home, essentially. I get to witness the Sodom and Gommorah of food sin every day on a cruise, especially at breakfast. Football sized mounds of food get piled on a plate, and a lot of it is eaten. But it pains me to see a muffin with one bite. A bowl of cereal that had one bite, uneaten food galore. Yes, we pay for the food in our cruise fare, but it is as though we have no conscience when it comes to waste. We often stop in Haiti at the cruise line’s resort, and they prepare a barbeque style lunch there. What many don’t know is that the leftovers are given to the locals, and I have watched them pick a piece of discarded watermelon off of the ground and brush off the sand to eat. While people are tossing full plates of food into the trash, these people are desperate for our scraps.
Food waste bothers me. For the farmer that took the time to sow the crops. For the cow kept pregnant to provide milk. For the pig slaughtered to provide us with ribs and bacon. For the countless hours spent preparing the food. We don’t honor what we have. We assume it is there because most of us have not had to go without. I am lucky, I always had a meal to eat, and I don’t waste food. I eat leftovers until they are gone, I cut my own fruit so that I can get the most out of the rind, and I toss produce scraps out for the deer and groundhogs that frequent my backyard.
We don’t appreciate the food we have. That is the sin.
The future of American women
Cajun Chicken Club Sandwich
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
4 boneless skinless chicken breast halves
1 teaspoon Cajun seasoning
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
4 slices Swiss cheese
1/4 cup Parmesan salad dressing
4 hoagie rolls, split and toasted
8 slices tomato
8 strips bacon, cooked
Instructions
Pound the chicken to 3/8-inch thickness; sprinkle with Cajun seasoning.
In a large skillet, cook the chicken in oil for 5 minutes on each side or until no longer pink.
Place one slice cheese over each chicken piece.
Remove from the heat; cover and let stand for 1 minute or until cheese begins to melt.
Spread dressing over cut sides of rolls.
Place two slices of tomato on bottom of bun, top with chicken and two strips of bacon.
Serve with crispy fries or potato salad on the side.
When I was married to my exhusband, I got a ‘‘bee in my bonnet’ that I wanted to learn how to sew. I’d never sewed a day in my life. So we went to different places, looking at machines. Hubs was a ‘research on Consumer Reports’ kinda guy. He didn’t want to buy something that would fall apart. Who knows though, honestly, if I would suck at this?! I’m not sure if he looked at it that way. He just wanted to get me something good.
So, we kind of narrowed it down to a couple, and tbh, they were ridiculously nice. One was a Singer, the other I don’t remember but it was pricey I think like $800 in like 1990. Crazy, for just wanting to try something. It was going to be a ““surprise” for Christmas… but I sneaked a look in his wallet one night (I KNOW, bad wifey) and saw he bought the $800 wonder. I was SOOO excited!!
Christmas morning comes.
I’m still very excited, because this IS an awesome gift. Knowing did not diminish my excitement. I opened up the wrapping, and inside, it was a different machine.
Tears rolled down my face and I couldn’t speak. The $800 wonder wasn’t there. Apparently, he had exchanged it. For an upgraded, fancy $1100. Wonder.
It was amazing. It did embroidery, a zillion stitches. It was a very high quality name I can’t spell 😂 Husqvarna? But wait, there’s more. There’s another box. Inside that box was a 5 thread Serger, a BabyLoc. I had everything I needed to be successful.
I sewed my butt off for years.
But I’ll never forget that feeling of ““I want to give you the moon” that he gave me that Christmas. That was epic.❤️
If the controls are successful, they could handicap China for a generation; if they fail, they may backfire spectacularly, hastening the very future the United States is trying desperately to avoid. Alex W. Palmer, NYT.
The Chinese cannot understand why we fight with “Fists of Seven Injuries” (七伤拳), inflicting as much harm on ourselves as on our target. The sanctions hit our high-tech companies hard, as they lose not only their biggest market, but also important partners in their supply chain. Qualcomm’s profits fell 23%. Samsung’s dropped 95% . Louise Low. Face-off on the Grand Chessboard.
The year of living vulnerably: 2015
By 2015, when President Xi warned of China’s vulnerability to a chip embargo his team, led by the redoubtable Liu He, had spent two years preparing to create an indigenous chip industry. By 2022, the first fabs were producing commodity chips in high volumes at low cost and China spent $300 billion importing high-end chips.
The first breakthrough came when Huawei quietly released its 7 nm. Kirin 9000 chipsets, and its Mate 60 phone sales quickly surpassed Apple’s – as they were doing when the US embargoed Huawei. While the Kirin CPU was a remarkable achievement, professionals were more impressed by Huawei’s indigenous communications chips, like cellular modems, previously a Qualcomm semi-monopoly.
Three months later, YMTC shipped its 232-layer 3D TLC NAND memory chips. Their huge capacity and speedy 12 GB/s I/O make bleeding-edge drives possible.
But the sexiest market right now is insulated gate bipolar transistors, IGBTs. They’re the CPU ‘brains’ that conduct the orchestra of sensors and inputs and reduce EVs’ power loss and improve reliability. They’re expensive: 7% – 10% of an EVs’ final cost. Back in 2020, BYD supplied IGBTs for 20% of Chinese EVs’ and Infineon supplied 58%. The IGBT market has grown from $5.27 billion then to $8.42 billion this year and expects CAGR of 15.7% for some years.
There’s also money to be made in less sexy chips, like microcontrollers, says TP Huang. “Has anyone heard of Zhixin’s chips? You’ll find SMIC’s 40nm auto grade processor in Zhixin’s MCU microcontroller – domestically designed, fabbed and packaged entirely in China. This has huge implications for STMicro, Texas Instruments, Infineon and TSMC. Few automotive applications will ever need processes beyond 28 or 40nm, which is SMIC’s mass production sweet spot. Why wouldn’t Chinese automakers buy domestically? I bet Wall Street analysts covering TI have never looked into new Chinese competitors and considered what that entails. SMIC will be a monster soon enough”.
I was strung out for about 4 years from shooting up dope. After losing almost everything, I finally snapped out of it. It took, however, losing friends, my career, my therapist, my car, my motorcycle, my musical equipment, my instruments, my tools, my electricity, my water, all my savings which was in the tens of thousands, my sanity, almost my freedom, almost my life, and almost my house. I’m still in danger of losing it bc of unpaid property taxes of 3 years now going on 4. So when I was about 2–3 months sober, I had a friend drive me to Little Caesars to see if they were hiring. The manager was there. I asked. She said yes. Then she asked if I had manager experience. I said no…but I kinda did. I just wasn’t prepared for that gig being that I’m just barely out of a horrific addiction. She asked if I had an ID and a bank account for direct deposit. I said yes to the ID but no to bank account. She told me where I can get one at that moment and as soon as I get it to come back and I can begin to fill out the paperwork. Within 30 mins I was hired & started to fill out the necessary forms for employment. This was at the end of January this year and I’m still there and I’m sober.
I know this is a long story for such a question. My reason for including the other info is strictly for those that are currently where I was at when this happened. If this can help one person snap out of it then I will feel like I did a tremendous good for not just that one person but the world. Drug addiction affects way more than the drug addict. If you’re struggling, don’t give up. Be strong. It may take one time to quit or many times. Just don’t give up on yourself. I now have electricity and water and trash service. My house is still a wreck but it’s come a long way. I rode my bike to and from work which was 8 miles there and 8 miles back. But now I have a vehicle. I’m 6 feet tall and at the height of my addiction I weighed about 155lbs. Now I weigh a plump 210lbs. With time, that will change bc I want to be physically healthy. I am, w/o a doubt, physically healthier now than I was when I was using. And I prefer this to that any day. So if you’re reading this, you have to be strong and committed to this change no matter how tough it gets. It’ll get better. There’ll be shit days but it’ll pass. Keep going. We are made of sterner stuff. We’ve been through hell but now we are returning. And don’t think of it as starting over. You’re continuing your journey w a wealth of knowledge and wisdom. You may have lost everything but you’re not starting over. I wish you luck and lots of love. You’re not alone. I know that feeling of loneliness and despair. I felt lonely all throughout my journey through hell. But I wasn’t. You aren’t. If you need someone to vent w, message me. I’ll listen. I will not judge. If not me, reach out to someone. Anyone. And if you get rejected, fuck them. Move on. Don’t let that deter you. Look at me. I’m still here and am getting better everyday. Sure, we are all different but, in many ways, we are the same. We fuck up, and to fuck up is human.
One more thing: don’t beat yourself up if you quit and then go back to using again. Sometimes it happens. Sometimes it doesn’t. Just don’t let that stop you from quitting again. I have days when I feel so weak. I miss it so much. Coupled w the overwhelming feeling of how far I have to go to get back to where I was before my downfall, it feels hopeless. These moments test me, and I’ve come so close to shooting up again but I haven’t. I hope I don’t. In my journey, I always feel so glad I didn’t give in. Those feelings will wash away but they’ll be back again like waves in the ocean. You just stay afloat. It’ll pass and you’ll admire yourself for not giving in after it flows away. You’ll be proud of how strong you are becoming.
Anyway, there are my 2 cents.
Love yourself.
Love those around you.
Don’t be afraid to say it.
Don’t be afraid to show it.
Amp It The Fuck Up!!!
Antony Blinken Wrecked By Protesters In Congress
Great episode, Lee. Your humor is top dog here.
China and the Chip Wars: a Battle It Cannot Afford to Lose
The race for supremacy in the semiconductor industry is about much more than just technological dominance. It is about shaping the future of civilization.
“Can China ace the chip wars?” This was the central question that framed my talk at the Future of Finance China Forum held in Beijing on July 28. The forum, run by The Asian Banker, served as a critical platform for thought leaders amid the unpredictable economic and financial landscape of 2023.
While these wide-ranging discussions were informative, my focus was squarely on the place and potential of China in the semiconductor industry. Instead of merely asking if China can win the chip wars, it’s more insightful to consider whether China can afford not to. This reframing provides a sharper understanding of the stakes for China’s economy and its global standing in the semiconductor industry.
Current situation
“Valuation extravaganza” is a phrase I use to describe the surging market caps of companies like Nvidia and AMD. The remarkable value growth of these companies has raised eyebrows and led to questions about whether we’re witnessing a semiconductor bubble. However, the rational ubiquity of semiconductors, essential to various sectors, might justify these high valuations.
In 2021, over 1.1 trillion chips were shipped worldwide, finding their way into everything from cars and consumer electronics to industrial applications. Semiconductors, quietly yet crucially, have become a part of nearly every aspect of modern life. According to a recent survey of industry executives, the industry’s future direction is being steered by emerging sectors like the metaverse, sustainability, mobility, and digital health – each calling for unique semiconductor capabilities.
This importance of semiconductors is reflected in the market’s response. Nvidia’s stock price tripled last year raising its valuation to more than $1 trillion with a Price-to-Earnings (P/E) ratio over 240. AMD’s stock price has also doubled, its P/E ratio almost reaching 500. This valuation growth is partly due to the robust demand for semiconductors, with the global market projected to grow to $1.8 trillion by 2032.
Even with the current chip shortage, some industry observers argue that these high valuations are justified. They view the long-term growth prospects for the industry as strong and believe these valuations are based on the expectation of persistent semiconductor demand.
Despite short-term disruptions like the global chip shortage, the long-term outlook for the semiconductor industry remains bright. Semiconductors play an integral role in the global economy, and their importance will continue to grow in the future, shaping our tech-driven world in ways we’re only beginning to understand.
Future growth
We must also consider the potential drivers of future chip demand, taking into account the radical changes that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) may bring. A compelling perspective on this comes from Sam Altman, a prominent figure in the tech industry and CEO of OpenAI, in his manifesto “Moore’s Law for Everything”.
Altman applies the principle of Moore’s Law, which traditionally refers to the exponential growth in computing power, to a broader societal context, predicting a future where rapid growth permeates all facets of our lives and economy. Coined by Intel’s co-founder Gordon Moore, the law originally observed that the number of transistors on a microchip double roughly every 18 months. Altman, however, envisions its implications beyond the realm of computing power.
This broader interpretation anticipates an era of abundance, where the ubiquitous adoption of AI causes a steep drop in labor costs that fundamentally transforms society. Altman posits that as automation replaces human tasks from plumbing to R&D, labor costs will plunge, leading to significantly cheaper goods and services. The cost of the essential inputs shifts from labor and raw materials to data, driving prices towards zero and marking the advent of an era of profound abundance.
But abundance here isn’t just about an increase in available goods and services. It’s also about equalizing access to these resources, democratizing what was once the exclusive privilege of the affluent. High-quality healthcare, education, travel experiences, and even a secure standard of living—Altman’s vision suggests these will be accessible to far more people, with the cost of a “great life” approaching zero.
At the core of this transformation is AI, its learning and decision-making abilities propelling us towards this era of abundance. Yet, the manifestation of this AI-driven prosperity depends heavily on a robust, efficient, and advanced computational infrastructure— semiconductors or chips. Semiconductors are the foundation of our digital world, powering everything from personal devices to advanced machinery.
The complexity and scale of AI necessitate more advanced and efficient semiconductors. The AI algorithms promising this era of abundance require enormous computational power to process large volumes of data and make complex calculations. The task of providing this computational power depends on a wide range of semiconductors.
The abundance that Altman predicts will not only be driven by AI but will also critically hinge on the availability and advancement of semiconductors. In the coming era of AI-driven abundance, those countries and companies that can ensure a stable supply of chips will hold the upper hand. Thus, as China strategizes to win the chip wars, the stakes become clear—it’s not just about surviving but thriving in this world of unlimited abundance.
Domestic politics and geopolitics
In the global context of the race for technological supremacy, the semiconductor industry is emerging as a key battleground. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI), with its potential to usher in an era of unprecedented abundance and revolutionize labor economics, amplifies the national security implications of the semiconductor industry. Indeed, the ‘resilient redesign’ of the global supply chain is becoming an essential facet of national strategies to ensure sustained success in this critical sector.
The complex web of today’s supply chain, spanning continents and countless entities, is inherently vulnerable to geopolitical shocks and pressures. The need for countries to develop resilient domestic capacities is becoming increasingly clear. Governments worldwide are already showing a keen interest in the sector’s growth and security, a trend that is set to heighten as strategic reorientations, regulatory shifts, and a heightened focus on security come into play. The semiconductor industry is becoming a significant geopolitical flashpoint, a field of intense competition for technological dominance.
In the context of China’s domestic politics, this resonates profoundly with President Xi Jinping’s vision of ‘common prosperity’. The potential abundance enabled by AI could pave the way for realizing this vision, democratizing access to what is currently available only to the affluent and creating a more equal society. The era of abundance that Sam Altman envisions could, in fact, help manifest President Xi’s aspiration for the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
In this light, China’s broad conception of national security – which encompasses not only traditional military aspects but also economic and even cultural security – becomes particularly relevant. The advancements in AI, underpinned by the semiconductor industry, will be vital for maintaining and enhancing China’s national security in this broad sense.
Therefore, China cannot afford to lose the ‘chip war’. The stakes are beyond high – economic vitality, technological advancement, geopolitical influence and even the future of the human race. The semiconductor industry is not just another industry; it is a cornerstone upon which human civilization may be decided.
In conclusion, the race for supremacy in the semiconductor industry is about much more than just technological dominance. It is about shaping the future of civilization. For China, acing the chip wars is not just a matter of national security in the traditional sense. It is also about securing the future of its society and realizing its vision of prosperity for all.
Before a class room of three hundred 1st year students, I was teaching, and my cell phone started vibrating. And I totally froze.
Just a couple of months earlier, I had become a father for the first time, and my girlfriend and I had agreed not to call during class hours, unless it was an emergency.
Often, I muted my cell phone during class hours, but this time I had forgotten. And this time the phone also rang. My girlfriend was the only person who would ring me at this unearthly hour in the morning. And suddenly it crossed my mind. Something is wrong with the baby.
Instead of two minutes, I had more than fifteen minutes left to cover while my mind blocked my every mathematical thought. So I taught the rest of the class through a true other-worldly out-of-body experience — I literally heard myself talking to the students, explaining things on the blackboard, and answering questions, while I was constantly thinking —
Something is wrong with the baby—Something is wrong with the baby—Something is wrong with the baby—Something is wrong with the baby.
When class was over and questions had been answered, I immediately called my girlfriend. She had forgotten about our agreement.
I’m a landlord and went to renew the lease on one of my rentals once. And when I pulled in to the neighborhood and turned the corner towards the house, the very first thing I saw was the screen door hanging off the front of the house.
I pulled into the driveway, knocked on the door, and while I was waiting for them to answer I looked at the screen door. It was literally ripped off its hinges.
Then they came out and greeted me as if nothing had ever happened.. I asked what happened to the door, and I swear they both looked me straight in the eye and said..
“It was like that when we moved in.” I was absolutely shocked…
I said, “Doug. You two have been here for TWO YEARS. You signed a move-in checklist when you first moved in that said everything was ok. I took and have pictures of everything before you moved in. And last but not least, I was here exactly ONE year ago to renew your lease then! Now, is this seriously your story, and are you sure it’s the one you want to stick to??”
“Yes.. It was like that when we moved in.”
So I called bullshit and told them that I would not renew their lease, and to be out before the end of the week. OR if they wanted to stay then they could fix the door.
They fixed it – reluctantly. Still swearing that it was like that when they moved in.
When I was an administrative assistant to the dean of a department at a 2 year college, there were a couple times during the year that I ate at my desk for various reasons. There was another admin in a different department that took a dislike to me and tried to get me in trouble for only taking 30 mins to eat then leaving 30 mins early. She went to my boss and he said I had his permission to do so. She then went to HR to file a complaint and I got called in. After that, I requested a sit down with HR, my boss, her and her boss which we had. Over several weeks, I had documented everything she had said and done to undermine me and she turned beet red and had no real defense since she documented nothing. A couple of weeks later, she no longer worked there and they hired a woman who became a good friend.
Document everything—day, time, incident, what was said—and keep it in a safe place. I used an old fashioned college notebook and hand wrote everything with just a blank line between each incident. I about filled the notebook in less than a month.
He was the head janitor at my school, a teddy bear of a man, under 5 feet tall with the sweetest little smile and laugh. He had worked at the school since he was a teen and was due to retire.
Da Tuk (not his real name) was gentle, kind and generous, a soft touch for a sob story. He and his family had just enough but always ended with too little because of his ‘kindness.’
A relative had begged him for a large sum, almost all that Da Tuk and his wife had saved for a deposit on a home. He signed over a land deed to Da Tuk and then disappeared into the gambling dens of Klong Tuey.
When Da Tuk took his family to see the land, they found a hilly, barren, nowhere-near-anywhere, unsellable plot. Da Tuk was inconsolable, realizing that he had been duped and had lost almost everything.
Fortunately, the chairman of the school found a way to help the family to buy a small house and deal with the costs of their children’s educations. They never really recovered from the loss.
As the school grew, so did Da Tuk’s staff, to the point where he was overwhelmed. An ‘assistant’ was hired but was, in fact, in charge. However, he always treated Da Tuk as the boss and saw to it that others did as well.
For Da Tuk’s retirement day, the Board had arranged for a huge luncheon, and we were all seated, waiting for Da Tuk.
When he arrived, he looked stunned, which surprised us because everyone had been talking about the party and teasing him for over a month.
Then an equally stunned member of the Board made a shocking announcement.
Da Tuk had just been paid forty million baht (approximately two million U.S. dollars) for that ‘worthless’ land because it was adjacent to the planned eastern seaboard industrial estate.
I got laid off from my work. It’s an awful experience. I just had the yearly performance review and got a raise, I was thinking ‘life is freaking good’, then one fine morning, I woke up to a sudden 1:1 from my boss, and he told me I was let go (together with half of the company).
It’s unexpected, and I was shocked.
I sent my coworkers texts, told them my goodbyes and my wish to stay in touch with them.
All of them offered the same message:
Please let me know how I can help in any way at all!
I was touched seeing those messages, truly.
The only thing I asked from them was: I need to retouch my Linkedin Profile, the job market right now is super tough and competitive, anything can help my profile stands out would mean a great deal and I really appreciate a recommendation from them – if they have a few minutes to write me one. It would be a huge help.
Only 2 out of 10 people offered me the message to help in any way actually did give me a recommendation. And one of them actually referred me everywhere she could trying to help me to get interviews.
I don’t think any less of the 8 people that didn’t give me a recommendation. I understand perfectly that there are millions reasons for that, like I might not worth giving a recommendation, or they just simply forgot to give one, or writing a recommendation is not their cup of tea, etc… I just wish they didn’t tell me that they would help in any way if they didn’t mean it.
And I do admire the ones that offer and live up with their saying “let me know how I can help in any way”
Being a person of their own words is a super power.
Way out in the stick in the north of England there was huge project ongoing to build a dam. A new site manager had been brought in because workers were reportedly lazy, either turning up late or skiving off down the local pub (which I worked in) during working hours. On his first day on the job he grabbed someone from the admin office and headed off round the site looking for a sacrificial lamb. He was going to fire someone as an example to the rest of the staff.
After half an hour or so he came across a young guy sitting behind a building, against a wall, drinking coffee.
“Who are you?” he bellowed. “What’s it got to do you with you?” asked the guy. “I’m the new site manager, who are you, and where do you work?” “Fuck off, leave me alone!”, replied the young guy. “OK, you’ve had your chance, you’re fired!” He turned to the admin guy, “get his details, give him his cards!” The site manager then stormed off thinking this was a good start to his tenure.
Later that day I was serving behind the bar in the pub and the guy came walking in. “Give me a pint of Guinness, I’ve just been fired”. “Oh dear, first one’s on the house!” “Cheers, that’s very nice of you.” he replied. He had his Guinness then asked how much? I said, “no, it’s on the house. Anyone who gets fired from the site gets a free beer.” “No – it’s okay, I’d better pay!” “But you got fired – it’s free!” “I did get fired. I’m just sitting there having a cup of coffee when this idiot appears out of nowhere screaming and shouting at me, and fires me on the spot. He seemed so happy about it I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I didn’t work for him, and I’m just a hiker who had stopped for a coffee.”
Surprised My Cheating Wife With Divorce Papers at Her “Secret” Hotel Getaway Affair.
I nearly hit ENTER on my resignation email. I’d been with the company for 24 years at the time and I was tired of my boss contradicting everything I’d say. Sometimes he was right, usually he wasn’t but of course he only remembered that one out of 10 times he was right come review time.
Most people say I’m too much of a pacifist but he’d ding me as pointlessly argumentative. And, the reason why I was never promoted (he’d tell me year after year) is because I’d said or done “the wrong thing yet again to” and it would always be an unnamed executive. If I asked what I did or said, I’d get “you know I can’t tell you that” and if I asked who’s cage I’d supposedly rattled, it would be another “you know I can’t tell you that.”
This day, he said something that was completely wrong about a field he knew zero about and that I was an expert in. I should have known better but I said something just “in passing.” He erupted and screamed at me. “YOU ARE WRONG and you felt the need to ruin my day. I walked in here this morning feeling okay for the first time in months. You couldn’t let it go. Noooo … not you … you had to correct me and ruin my whole day. And you aren’t even right Mr. Know-it-all. Fine. You ruined my day so now I’m going to ruin yours. I expect a written apology, three copies, and this is going in your file.
I will then have your final written warning for insubordination and disrupting the office ready when you come back with your apology. IF I accept it, you will go on warning. But if I don’t like what you said, I tear that and the warning up and you will be done. You have pretty much just thrown away 24 years of work and any goodwill you might have built up with me because you just always have to say something.
You just can’t let anything go and you always have some story. No matter what anyone says, you were there, did that, had that or something too. Well now I think you can add fired for cause and blacklisted from a whole industry to your awesome list of life experiences. I’m giving you one hour. I’ll see you then or you can spend the time packing up your stuff. I really don’t care which at this point.
And because you are a critical employee with no backup or replacement, I will see to it that you pay for this for a long time to come if I have any say over anything. Now get going. The next time I see you, it will be either carrying your shit to your car or in here with a heart felt written apology.”
I typed out a resignation, just a terse one paragraph indicating only that I resigned effective that day and would agree to make my last day two weeks hence. Dated and my signature typed. I was ready to hit SEND and the email would go to my boss, HR and the Sr VP (who was the department head).
But then I thought: first, I’d be out of a job and it would not be easy for me to get another one. It’s next to impossible to describe what I really do — it’s a bunch of low level tasks where the high level aspect is that I can do them all. I already knew that no one in my industry was interested — had they been, I’d have been contacted at least one of the times where competitors or clients tried to grab employees from us. I was about the only long time employee who’d never been contacted by anyone.
My resume would make even less sense outside my industry. I’d at best have to hope for some small employer looking for a jack of many trades willing to work for next to nothing. Not very appealing.
He was right in one sense about something: whenever someone had a story, I’d often have a counterpart. I’m not a know it all, just a lot older than many of my colleagues and I’ve been around. I’d always thought I was just participating in a conversation but maybe that’s not the way some took it. Perhaps I should sit and listen more even if I did have such an experience myself and even if the teller was way off base.
So I resolved to say a lot less and not correct people unless there could be a serious consequence for letting it go. Even if I’d done whatever 50 times to their 1 and was considered an expert, just let it go. Let them tell their story.
Ruined his day? That was his responsibility. He was going through many personal problems but people other than I were getting tired of his ripping our heads off at work because his personal life was in a tailspin. I know that when I was having many issues one time (many years ago, different boss), my manager came along and told me I needed to straighten myself up.
He knew what I was going through and that’s why nothing had been said for a couple weeks. But now I had to pull myself out of it or he’d have to let me go. That was a couple weeks … but my current boss had been going on that way for months.
So there was wrong on my side and that was on me to handle. But I wasn’t responsible for ruining my boss’ day with an offhand comment of a factual nature. I needed to speak a lot less: not counter a story with one of my own, and don’t correct someone unless there was a vital business need for it. On the other hand, I was not about to take written responsibility for someone else’s life and emotions.
I apologized verbally including indicating where I was wrong and what I planned to do about it. But I made clear what I was apologizing for along with being clear without saying it that it would not be in writing. I also made clear without throwing anything in his face that if he chose to give me a final written warning, I would not sign it but rather resign effective immediately.
Nothing more came of it in large part because by the time I walked in there, the anger was gone. I dealt with this in a clear headed way and that’s the point to this long answer. Anger solves nothing, even if justified or at least partially so. We’ve probably all snapped at work and with what results? If you have sufficient clout, others might respond out of fear. But that never results in a good long term effect. You’re far better off resisting the urge to go off until you’ve had a few minutes to think about the whole situation.
I’m boy, When I was 13 , The principal always checks students’ hair and nails and punishes them if they were long
One day, he came to the line and checked our nails, I had forgotten to trim my nails for a long time, and my nails were long like a girl’s.
When he saw my nails, he asked sarcastically: Am I a girl?
I was embarrassed and lowered my head
The principal sent me to the corner of the wall and I stood facing the wall with my head down
he sent about ten other people to the side of the wall because their nails were too long
When all the students went to class, the manager and the principal came to us with a ruler, the principal said, we have to give them a nice punishment!
Principal said that we should paint their nails to make them girls!
They took us to the manager’s office and forced us to put our hands on the table
Then the manager took out a bottle of red nail polish from his drawer and started painting our nails completely
We felt ashamed and humiliated and our heads were down
They took us to the front of the line in front of all the students and calles us girls!
All the students laughed at us and we cried and felt humiliated
They hit our palms with a ruler to make us cry more!
From that day on, we didn’t have the courage to keep our nails long
1. Successful people don’t leave their life in the hands of luck. Life is too unpredictable to leave it in the hands of luck. Therefore, successful people choose to take control of things rather than sit around and wait for luck to finally smile at them.
2. Successful people take risks at the right place, at the right time. Successful people know that they don’t have the luxury to be taking mindless risks that can do more bad than good. Rather, they wait for that perfect timing and occasion when they can justify taking the risk.
3. Successful people trust their intuition. Many people underestimate the power of gut feeling. But in reality, it’s one of the most efficient and free tools you can utilize profitably. And successful people know how to do just that.
4. Successful people are the masters of their own destiny. Some people believe that one’s destiny is predetermined, and so they decide to simply let things unfold accordingly. But successful people prefer to take charge and carve out the destiny they aim for.
5. Successful people know the importance of having control over their emotions. They understand the impact emotional control or the lack thereof can have on their motivation, perseverance, and overall success. Therefore, they always try to keep their emotions under control so they’ll be the ones having the power over them.
6. Successful people practice positive self-talk. Successful people try not to listen to that negative voice in their head that tells them it is not going to work out. They don’t insult themselves, either. Instead, they train themselves to be compassionate, understanding, and encouraging toward themselves so they never succumb to the destructive effects of negative self-talk.
7. Successful people know that making mistakes is an essential part of the process leading them to ultimate success. They are aware that no matter how many mistakes they make along the way, they can make use of each by learning from them, guiding them toward success they’ve been working hard for.
8. Successful people know how to take constructive criticism well. Not only do they understand the benefits of constructive criticism, but they also appreciate getting it because they see it as a way to improve themselves or get closer to their goals.
9. Successful people have an unshakeable faith in themselves. Even if everyone else around them thinks they are just idealistic dreamers chasing after unrealistic goals, they refuse to see themselves from the same lenses because they know they have what it takes to get the things they are after.
My first thought was to say no but as I was paying for my gas I grabbed the milk. Outside was his girlfriend holding a box of cereal. He thanked me and I started to walk to my car. Something in me made me turn around. I told them I was about to get a car wash but if he wanted to wash it for me I’d pay him $20. We went to the nearest car wash and he had tears in his eyes after I paid him!
He told me that more than anything he appreciated me giving him the opportunity to be a man again in the eyes of his girlfriend and work for the money. The whole time his girlfriend helped him. It’s like she was proud of him. You could tell the love was so real. Real beyond material things and what he could do for her. She told him he did a great job and he couldn’t stop smiling. I had a long talk with him and her and he had a backpack full of paperwork from all of the places he’s been going to get help for them. I drove them to my apartment complex and gave him clothes for interviews and a few outfits and fitted caps. I don’t have much but life is about sharing what you do have.
Be a blessing to someone today because you could be in that situation before you know it! I gave them my number and I plan to take them to any interviews or appointments they have. It’s a great day to be alive no matter what your situation is. Someone has it worse than you! Share this message and inspire others to do good.”
Well it was a older Ford heavy duty truck, a three axle mini dump truck. It came in for brake work and when I opened the hood I discovered that most of the underhood wiring was redone with household electrical wiring cable, Romex and stripped Romex. It ran fine for a truck of the era that it was built and when the guy came to pick it up after the brake work, I had to ask about the wiring. He had the truck sitting unused for several years while he was working for someone and mice or squirrels had gotten in and destroyed the wiring and he had a roll of Romex in his garage and redid the wiring using another very similar truck as reference and got some bits from another truck he found in a junkyard. Mechanically the truck was solid and I was more impressed than anything else with the craftiness.
Woman Demands A Train Ran On Her! This Is Why Men Question The Value Of MW
Lack of purpose. All your young life you are given purpose of passing exams and learning, then all of a sudden you are thrown into the world and told to find your own meaning.
You can stay up as late as you want. But you shouldn’t.
Where did all my friends go?
Didn’t know that other adults have the emotional intelligence of teenagers and its almost impossible to deal with logically.
Getting burnt out.
Having to make dinner every. Fucking. Day.
Not having a lot of free-time or time by myself.
Figuring out what makes you happy. Everyone keeps trying to get you to do things you’re good at, or that makes you money, but never to pursue what you enjoy.
The more life you’ve lived, the faster time seems to go.
I once stopped to help a guy change a tire. He had an arm in a sling and two very young kids in his car. He thanked me saying he didn’t want to hurt his arm any more and wanted to get back to work.
Fast forward three months and I’m in a very ugly motorcycle wreck. One of the EMTs noticed my back was broken. Had they continued I’d have been paralyzed. His quick thinking prevented that.
After I recovered I got to meet the EMT crew that saved my life.
The guy that noticed my back was broken? The guy whose tire I had changed.
About 25 years ago, while living in Tucson Arizona, I received a phone call (bold = caller, non-bold = me):
Hi; Is this David Joseph? Dr. David Joseph?
Yes, who’s this?
Hi David!! It’s Garry Shandling!
Now at that time, Garry Shandling was a pretty well-known comedian, with his own show (“It’s Garry Shandling’s Show”), which was well known for its hilarious opening theme song. I was a big fan of his show, so I assumed a friend was pranking me:
Oh really?? Garry Shandling? Prove it; sing me your opening theme song!
He went ahead and sang me his opening theme song, and then went on:
David, how have you been? It’s been forever — can you believe it’s been over 20 years since we graduated?!
Since we graduated? Graduated what??
High School; Palo Verde??
Wait, I think you have the wrong David Joseph; are you looking for Dr David Joseph, the vet?
Yes; that’s not you? I thought your voice sounded different!
Yeah, that’s not me; I’m a people doc. I think that David Joseph moved away from Tucson a few years ago.
Oh, bummer. OK, I guess I’ll keep trying to find him — we were really close in High School.
Well, if you don’t find him, feel free to call me anytime; I’m happy to be your back-up Dr David Joseph!
Haha! Maybe I will! Thanks!
Good luck!
Then he called back a couple of hours later, explaining that he hadn’t been able to find his high school friend. We chatted a bit more, and then, once every few years, out of the blue, I would get a call from him, wanting to ‘catch-up with his back-up David Joseph.’
After I made a successful (static line) parachute jump – which turned out to be my first ever (and last) jump from a plane – I traveled back to the jump site three more times with Jeff C. to do it again. Various conditions prevented that from happening again, and after the third time that we were unable to jump again, we saw a fire a couple blocks off the interstate that was being fought by a team of professionals. A police officer instructed us to move along, but Jeff chimed in with “Why don’t they just let a good fire burn?” The officer walked to the front of Jeff’s car and wrote down the license plate and village sticker information, then asked Jeff AND me for ID. During the following week, I talked to mutual acquaintances of Jeff and related the aforementioned story to them. From one former coworker of Jeff, I learned that he was suspected of possibly starting two fires at his place of employment, with the second allegation causing him to be let go – I decided not to key ‘fi_ed’ – immediately. I no longer answered any of Jeff’s subsequent telephone calls, and did not answer the door when he came over.
Psychologist Addresses FEMALE DISRESPECT: why this is essential to relationship success
Damn! This is one HELL of a great video! Shit! Amazing video!
What most people don’t understand is that disrespect is a process. The best predictor of overt disrespect is covert disrespect. And this is why it is important to address disrespectful behavior while it is still in its nascent form. Failing to do so will jeopardize your relationship, primarily due to the fact that it is not possible for a woman to love a man she does not respect.
“Seeing how my now ex wife treated me compared to everyone else was an eye opener. I realized why everyone liked her, she treated them with respect and care, while I got the cold, cruel, disrespectful part.”
He beat me with a belt until I would bleed when I was very young and then when I became a teenager he would beat me with his fists. He broke my nose and blacked my eyes a few times. He’s dead now and I’m 69 years old. I have never for forgiven or forgotten. He beat my mom too. They divorced after I left home at 17. May he rot in HELL!
Oh man! I sure have. Often. Up until recently I worked, either with a guy or on my own, doing demolition, kitchen removals and buying/selling used building materials. I also ride a motorcycle. A big-ass noisy motorcycle. And, personally, I think I am a pretty nice person. I am considerate, kind and polite. But sometimes I am covered in drywall or brick dust, insulation, paint or sawdust. I usually carry Handy Wipes to, at least, wipe my face and hands clean. I may be dressed in work clothes and/or motorcycle gear. I am otherwise a well-groomed, clean, and pleasant 54 year old woman. I currently work outside all day and am in and out and crawling around assessing cars and trucks. Again, in work clothes or cover-all’s I am often dusty and wind-blown with dirty, with grease under my nails.
AND I GET TREATED LIKE SHIT.
I get followed, have had rude and disparaging comments made or completely ignored. Some staff treat me like I am invisible and are dismissive, assuming (I think) that I have no money to spend. At other times, they have been openly mistrusting and suspicious.
ALL BECAUSE I WORK FOR A LIVING!
Two of my very worst experiences occurred at places connected to religious institutions. One a church bazaar and the other a faith-based second hand shop. Another time I was speaking, as a counsellor, on a panel about alcoholism and addiction. Independent of each other, the hosts TWICE assumed that I was the newly recovered individual as opposed to the presenting professional.
In NO WAY am I ashamed of what I do or how I look. In fact, I am proud of who I am and the jobs I have done (and still do). I just wish people would judge me on my character or my actions rather than the way I look.
Bought a small place years ago that had a nice shed that could be used for tools, mower, etc and I asked if it conveyed and was told yes. Went to move in after settlement and no shed. Since it was in the contract, I called my realtor and told her the she came back or I would immediately stop the sale. No shed by the next day when promised so I notified the bank again that the sellers were in breach of contract. I was living in the house but had not put my furniture in yet, still in the box trailer belonging to a friend. The sellers had the shed at their new place but moving it damaged it so I refused to accept it and they had to order a brand new shed, same size, for the deal to be completed. The bank held the check, I finished moving in, and 2 weeks later the shed arrived.
Don’t try fast ones when selling since you may seriously regret the expense of fixing it.
Do what my garden-savvy cousin did to keep deer away from her garden. She set up hoses and multiple impact sprinklers with a motion sensor that set them off when deer approached, startling them and soaking them. Very effective, and not mean.
If the neighbor complains your sprinklers got him wet, say “Sorry, I had to do something to keep the deer/bears/monkeys/kids from stealing all my peaches before I can make pies/cobblers/jam from them.
You could even say, if I have a good crop this year, I’ll bring you a bowl of peaches.
In Chinese culture, sharing a meal with friends or family is a time to socialize. It’s actually something I very much enjoy being part of. As a Westerner, growing up in a Western and traditional Southern family, children were “seen and not heard,” and the talking points of a meal were, “Please pass the salt,” or “mind your manners.” The lively, upbeat, excitement that is exuded by Chinese people sharing a meal is something I adore.
When I bought my house the seller told me he had lost a ring a few years prior, and if I ever found it, it would mean the world to him to get it back. Three years later I saw something shiny while I was raking leaves. I picked it up and realized it was a ring encased in mud. I cleaned it off but didn’t think it could possibly be the lost ring. The stones were so large I thought it must be costume jewelry. I phoned the old owner and told him I found a ring but didn’t think it was valuable and asked if he could come take a look. When he saw it he started to cry and said it had great sentimental value. He offered me a reward but I declined. It didn’t seem right to take money for something that belonged to him. What I thought was a cheap ring with glass stones turned out to be $70,000 worth of diamonds.
a friend of ours who at the time was single mother of two, her son is autistic. She complained she had no heat in her mini van and winter in southern Ontario can be bitter cold. Local franchise repair shop quoted her north of $1700 to fix it!
I said let me take it to my trusted repair shop.
After a quick diagnosis he says “is she a teacher?” I’m like “how’d you know?”
He says “I cleaned a pile of papers out of the vents by the the heater core…lots of heat now!”
$75 and she had heat again…and was advised to keep papers off her dash!
Yeah actually… A few years ago I went out on the town for a mates birthday – straight from work. I’m carrying with me a £2.5k laptop and my mates got his full pay packet in cash and a thermos of soup given to him by a friend for his birthday (separate story).
These two kids come up to us and demand all of our worldly belongings. We dismiss them, as the bravery of a nights worth of fairly strong Hazy Pale Ale courses through our veins. As we walk off, the braver of the two pulls out a pretty small knife and demands more of our attention.
With a look from my mate we start off round the corner. Once we’re there we in whispered, quick voices form a plan and we wait for them.
I caught the first guy with a swing of my rucksack right under the chin and all 15” and 2.6kg of my MacBook Pro knocked his head back nearly off his feet. My friend followed with the Thermos on the 2nd. We didn’t hold back on those hits.
Once they recovered enough to speak, the braver one asked the other one if he was bleeding… he was… and the other guy told him.
Angry from the revelation he was bleeding, he said if he ever saw us again we’re dead… My friend, living round the area didn’t take kindly to this and threw the statement back at him. Told him, NO if you ever come back here YOU’RE dead and flew at the guy with the Thermos a second time. He chased them both up the street with that flask, with me laughing in hysterics at the bottom of the road.
In a strange way, being drunk that night changed the whole outcome of that encounter. Doubt we would have stood up to them sober.
He most certainly has a case. One of my neighbors tried to have two of our old silver birches and one 50-years-old Cedar tree cut, and it cost him dearly. It started with a Christmas tree though.
We came back from the United States, and as usual when we are back from holidays, I checked the garden — just to see how the plants, flowers and mushrooms (but also our rabbits and barn owls) were doing.
And then I noticed that one of our beautiful Christmas trees had been cut. The top half was gone, and no higher Mathematics was needed to conclude who had done it. One of our neighbors — I once had a relationship with his youngest daughter Ebba, but he seemed reasonably normal in those days — goes berserk if even only a couple of leaves fall on his property.
This time, he had cut an evergreen conifer, and we were sick of it. We called the neighborhood police man to sort this out, and he reprimanded the neighbor — to no avail. We decided not to go to court for the time being.
Instead, he sued us.
Together with another neighbor friend (who apparently also had problems with leaves and needles without us knowing), he filed a complaint against us in Justice Court. Big goal: having some of our trees (two old birches and an old Cedar) cut.
It did not quite work out that way, though.
Instead, he was forcefully reprimanded by the judge, who explained that leaves and needles are a part of country life, and that there was nothing wrong nor illegal about them falling in his garden.
The judge also dismissed the demand that our trees would be cut —
“It is STRICTLY FORBIDDEN to cut old trees, Mister C., so NO ONE will touch them. And very high maximum penalties would be issued if someone would.”
(Goal not attained.)
Since then, our neighbor had become even more mental than before. He throws all the leaves and needles he can find in our garden, and he has, since recently, started to throw buckets of his own stinking urine in our backyard.
I’m also one of those foreigners who think China is not just good, but a great place to live in! After working in China for the past few years, I have realized so many reasons for loving China.
A quick list of my personal observations about China:
1. Life has been very peaceful in China: I am never worried about my personal safety, or disruption of work. Life has been going quite smoothly.
2. Cost of living: About RMB 5,000/month (~$700). For the quality of life that I have enjoyed in China, it can’t get more affordable.
3. Jobs: my job is going fine. No issues with salaries.
4. Tax holidays: expats from a good number of countries (including US) enjoy tax holidays in China (due to the Double Tax Avoidance Treaty). I have not paid any tax in China so far. 🙂
5. Great food: China offers one of my favorite cuisine (I also love Thai, Vietnamese, Malaysian, and Indian food). You can order from home. RMB 15 for 20 dumplings (饺子, jiaozi). Even if you cook at home, it can’t get cheaper than that.
6. Online shopping: you can buy almost everything online in China. Taobao is probably one of those few sites I visit every day. I buy something every day.
7. Cashless payments: we don’t carry cash in China. We just need to bring a phone, scan QR codes and pay. In fact, you can rent bicycles by just scanning QR codes (first 1hr ride is free).
8. I have a history of diabetes. Going anywhere, including back to the US, puts me at a very high risk of Covid-19 pandemic. There are great medical facility in China. Every Chinese city has a good number of hospitals. It’s very convenient to visit hospital in China (Btw, my city is virtually covid-19 virus free).
9. Learning Chinese: if you want to learn Chinese, China is the best place. The whole atmosphere is warm and welcoming. You’ll learn Chinese fast. This was also a reason for me to move to China.
10. Travel: Lots of nice places in China. Recently I visited Zhouzhuang (周庄), a water town (江南水乡). It was a pleasant experience. Chinese tourist attractions are generally very different from the typical western tourist attractions.
11. No illegal immigration: you can’t enter China illegally. You will be caught if you try. Penalties are heavy. You will be deported, however, only after serving the sentence.
Living in China is a very different experience. It doesn’t make sense to compare China with other countries (or vice versa). Explore what China has to offer, and you’ll love it.
Also, I wish to thank China for taking a good care of me throughout my China stay, especially during my diabetes phase. Otherwise, I couldn’t have survived probably.
The U.K.: much, much more working-class than Americans are raised to assume. It’s a textbook example of American ignorance that we tend to believe Brits are all very sophisticated and “aristocratic.” (And I don’t mean that as an insult, just a reality check.) Britain can be polished and classy, and it can be tougher than a bad neighborhood of Philly.
Ireland: deep beauty, deep gloom, too. Really depends on where you go and when and what you’re up to. One of the friendliest countries I’ve been to. Just don’t expect everything to be rainbows and sentimental fantasy and you’ll be fine. Again, from an American perspective: virtually all Americans need a reality check here.
Mexico: been there multiple times, still haven’t been killed. Haven’t witnessed so much as a mugging let alone a cartel operation. The worst thing I’ve seen is sexual harassment. The worst thing that personally happened to me was an epic case of farts. In general, what I’ve seen of Mexico is more truly cultured and sophisticated than a large chunk of the most hyped places in Europe and certainly more cultured and tasty than significant swathes of the United States. (Some of Mexico is pretty benighted, but the chances of you ending up in those corners of Mexico are next to none.)
The United States: lived here most of my life, still haven’t been shot. A country with places as diametrically different as Vermont and Miami Beach, New York and the Sonora. What’s pretty true about one place isn’t even remotely true about another. And contrary to the stereotype that Americans brook no criticism of our country, I think it’s actually the most hyper-self-critical country I’ve ever personally been to. If you can’t hear copious criticism coming out of the United States, see an ear doctor, your ears are plugged up. (Too much of this criticism is tribal criticism and not enough self-criticism, but Americans love to bitch and moan about the place. How do you not hear this?)
Canada: lovely people, lovely country, but nowhere near as happy or perfect as a big part of the world believes they are. Canadians are aware of their problems, because they’re honest. This isn’t a comment about Canadians. It’s a comment about the mystery of why so many other people aren’t aware of the problems and unhappiness that do exist in Canada.
Colombia: didn’t get killed. Didn’t see any obvious drug deals. Freakishly hot. Got horrifying Montezuma’a Revenge: do not ever ever EVER drink the water. Would I revisit? Yes.
Cuba: very much like the pictures of 1950’s cars and bars would have you believe. Fucking amazing to fly down there from Wisconsin in February: it’s not a long flight at all, but you feel like you’ve gone back 60 years in time and also dropped into what Southern Europe felt like a generation or two ago, not just the Caribbean. Lost worlds, truly. The sanitation will get you, though. The poverty is shocking. The people are wonderful but deserve so much better.
Italy: the only part I really liked was Sicily, where I didn’t killed by the mafia. Sicily was extraordinary.
Greece: incredibly cold when I was there. I think I picked up a minor case of pneumonia. It was March and I was freezing to death.
Turkey: went in 2002 and no Muslims killed me. The waiter brought his kid sister out, maybe 10 years old, to practice English. She giggled and thought Americans were funny. I thought the Turks were friendlier than the Greeks. But I was an asshole kid back then.
Bulgaria: also went in frozen weather in March 2002. Bulgaria was probably the closest to the grim Iron Curtain stereotype I’d sort of been expecting. (You half expected to see Stalin at the train station in Sofia.) But I’ve heard it’s changed a lot for the better. I was there 21 years ago. Would I revisit? Yes. In July.
Spain: didn’t see anybody going to bullfights. Tacos are not the dominant cuisine there. Paella is overrated tourist food. Seville beats Barcelona and Madrid. Go to Lanzarote for surreal quiet time (I was there last April, showed up in a tiny town at night, sat on the balcony watching the moon, and I was like “I’m in Spain and there’s no noise. This is weird.” Also, you’re more likely to see people having big parties than going to a Catholic religious procession. Spain has an exaggerated reputation for being “extremely Catholic.” The American Midwest is 10 times more Catholic.
Sweden: only went to Stockholm. Incredibly empty. Not very exciting. Dirtier than I expected.
Finland: severely underrated people.
Iceland: not as cold as Minnesota. (I’ve been to both in January. Iceland is Ipanema Beach compared to Minnesota.)
Portugal and Slovenia: Europe’s most underrated countries.
Czech Republic, Poland and Croatia: not gray. Everybody who heard I was going there said “that sounds so gray.” These places were bursting with color and life. Ate like a king for the price of a Big Mac meal in the U.S.
Bosnia: didn’t get killed. Contrary to stereotypes, that war ended 30 years ago. Being afraid to go because there had been a war and some bad shit in the past would be like being afraid to go to Germany in 1975, thirty years after WWII. Ridiculous. (I drove on some roads in Bosnia that were better than roads in Michigan. There are other roads where if you’re not paying attention, you’ll drive off a ledge and end up upside down in a cabbage patch.)
I’ve been to a few more countries, but that’s the gist.
One thing I’ve learned from travel is not to put too much stock in other people’s opinions. I’ve been to places they love that I hated. I’ve been to places they bashed or were afraid to visit that I thought were some of the best experiences of my life.
It’s not that I don’t trust anybody. It’s just that I’ve traveled enough to know that I’d rather go somewhere myself and form my own opinion.
Xi knows China needs the US, and of course the US needs China, maybe more so today.
Xi also knows that the world, which is facing more than enough difficulties right now, needs a stable US relationship and can not endure any major conflicts between the two largest economies.
Xi knows he can handle the situation here within China.
Then, looking around, who can help stabilize the bilateral relations? Who have a big say on the US domestic issues to try to calm down the sentiments there?
Is it possible, helpful and practical for him to talk to those big bosses of MICs, the Military Industrial Complex? Not quite possible — they prefer war than peace, they are thirsty for wars.
Is it helpful for him to talk to the US politicians? He has tried. He talked with Trump, and treated him well in Beijing, then what? Trump can tear down any agreements as he likes; He talked with Biden, last year in Bali, Indonesia, then what? Biden can’t even really govern his own administration team, neither the Democratics, let alone those from the GOP. But Xi tried once again, this time, he met Biden in San Francisco. But, again, then what? What if Trump came back after next election? He would again turn everything upside down.
Is it useful and helpful to talk to the general public? Might be of some help, but how many can he talk to? And how much help would that be of? No one really knows.
Then, who are left? The ones with a big say in the US politics, economy and even society — Yes, the business executives.
What they care more about is the market, the profits, the money, where China can offer. And with the money, they can stand with those candidates who are more practical and support a more pragmatic approach towards China, instead of those full of ideologies in their minds and even can’t wait to drum up a war with China.
Thus a comparably virtuous circle is hopefully to be formed to prevent the China-US relations from further spiraling down, which neither can China afford, nor can the US, as well as the whole world.
I joined a ship in Rotterdam and on sailing for Suez, noted that the generator oil temperatures were rather high. On asking the other engineers, they said “They’re always like that” which was often a reason given by those of an idle nature… I investigated and found that they had raised the alarm point to stop the alarms going off instead of actually fixing the problem, which I assumed to be the generator lube oil coolers being fouled. On arrival at Suez and waiting in the anchorage, we opened up the LO coolers but found that they were clear, though with a fine sand lying in the tube bottoms, suggesting a lack of seawater flow-rate. We transited Suez but on meeting the warmer seawater temperatures of the Red Sea, had to reduce the generator load to avoid them tripping out altogether. We put into Aden to fix the problem, blacked out and started working back from the seawater lines into the coolers to the pumps themselves, eventually having to take out just about all the seawater lines until on opening up the main piping from the pumps (some 650mm diameter) we found them to be just about blocked with an aggregate of mud, sand and shellfish, such that only a small diameter of some 250mm was available for passing water to the generator coolers. Out came the main length of piping and we started to shovel out the muck. As we cleared it, a large, Triffid/Hydra-like apparition started to appear, causing the more faint-hearted to jump back in alarm, though it was only moving by virtue of us shovelling out its supporting mussel bed… It turned out to be a submarine tree of surprising length and girth (around 5–6m long and about the diameter of my arm in the main trunk, with lots of squid like leaves on it which had been waving in the ever reducing breeze of seawater passing through the pipe. We eventually removed all the gunk and the “animal” itself and laid it along the plates for a photo opportunity (we only had the ship’s Polaroid instant picture camera in those days so I don’t have a record unfortunately).
How did such a large beast get into the system? Presumably it had entered as a micro-organism and found a handy place to anchor itself in the rubber jointing between flanges (its roots were entwined around the bolts) and then fed itself from the handy warm water stream passing its front door. It gradually grew, causing other marine life such as shellfish to cling on where the water was less turbulent, and then gathering mud and other essential nutrients from its environment. Amazing thing, but fortunately harmless in that it didn’t actually attack us… Being in Aden the temperature in the engineroom without the fans running was around 50C (we had to shut down the generators and rely on emergency lighting), such that we could only work for around 20 minutes each before having to go on deck in the (relatively) cooler air of some 35C Aden night time temperature. It took us most of the night to clear the piping and refit it – a big job indeed.
Final job on restarting everything was to wind the generator LO temperature alarms back to the proper alarm point; I checked back through the ship’s engineroom log books to see where the problem had first started, and it was some 3 years in the making without anyone investigating the slowly rising temperatures.
I was Marketing Director for a major, easily recognized company that manufactured female oriented products. Our President was in over his head, as evidenced by our declining market share and revenue. I was hired to help turn things around given my successful track record at other companies. However, the President couldn’t handle any outside suggestion or strategy unless it was his so I was constantly reprimanded for doing my job.
One day, my timid, suck-up boss sends me an email about a report she needs me to do ASAP. I scoll thru the entire email and at the end, I see it originated with a request from the President. Basically he wanted my boss to assign the report to me and once she had it to fire me. The email also contained some very derogatory & crude & inappropriate comments about my appearance.
I forwarded the entire email to my personal email account, HR and members of the Board. In exchange for me not pursuing legal action or sharing the incident with my press contacts (would have killed any credibility in the female marketplace), I received my bonus, 6 months severance including paying my health insurance, & a strong positive reference letter. I had a new position in 6 weeks.
The President was let go after about 2 months and it took him over 1 year to find a new position at a less prestigious company and lessor salary.
I wasn’t a mechanic, I was a service manager. A guy drove into the lot, he had poked a rod through his block. How the car was still running was a mystery. For some context, this was 1978, he was driving some little 1970 English import, a Vauxhall Viva, possibly. The blue book price was less than $500. He was a recent immigrant, with broken English, and obviously didn’t have much money, from the car he was driving.
I explained that it would cost twice as much to fix the car as it was worth. He didn’t appear to understand. So he called his pastor, who was his sponsor. I talked to the pastor when he arrived, and he called me a racist for refusing to work on an immigrants car. I explained it two different ways, and it didn’t make any difference.
I finally gave up, wrote up a work order, for $1200. Then I ran down the street to a convenience store, and bought an autotrader magazine. I handed him the work order first, and he audibly gasped. Yet it was just what I had verbally told him. Then I flipped the magazine open to a car like his, but in better shape, for sale for $500.
The light switched on. He wasn’t happy, but he now understood why I didn’t want to repair it. Since it was worth more than the car was to repair it, we would have required cash up front. Before starting the job.
My boss wasn’t happy with me, for spending my time driving away a customer.
I have no idea if the guy could have afforded to make the repair.
The next week the pastor started sending other members of his flock to us.
The following is a translation of a recent essay that examines the circumstances of close encounters between Chinese and U.S. militaries in China’s vicinity, explains China’s grievances, and identifies the factors that further heighten risks.
The author of this essay is Hu Bo, Research Professor and Director of the Center for Maritime Strategy Studies, Peking University, and Director of the South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative.
Full text below.
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Recently, the U.S. DoD “declassified” some of the videos and pictures of aerial encounters with PLA military aircraft in the East China Sea and the South China Sea, accusing China of “risky intercept” and “unprofessional behaviors.”
This is, of course, a one-sided narrative from the United States. The Pentagon has not made it clear where these air encounters took place or why they occurred. As the China-U.S. military competition intensifies, the frequency and intensity of air and sea encounters are increasing, and the risk of possible friction and conflict does exist.
However, the United States is hyping “anxiety”, partly because of real concerns about risks, and partly because it wants to take hold of the “moral high ground” in international public opinion and diplomacy.
In fact, in the waters surrounding China, such as the East China Sea and the South China Sea, despite the growing competition between the China-U.S. militaries as well as air and sea encounters, it is important to emphasize that the vast majority of the air and sea encounters between the China-U.S. militaries, which occur more than a dozen times a day and thousands of times a year, have been conducted in a safe and professional manner.
For example, in a 2022 emailed statement about transit through the Taiwan Strait, US 7th Fleet spokesperson Mark Langford said in an emailed statement that “all interactions with foreign military forces during the transit were consistent with international standards and practices and did not impact the operation.”
In August 2022, Capt. Amy Bauernschmidt told the press after the USS Abraham Lincoln, which she commanded, finished a deployment in the Pacific that “We were operating in the vicinity [of] Chinese warships at times, mostly … that shadowed our ship……It was safe and professional the entire time that we interacted with them. During some flight operations, our aircraft did interact with some of their aircraft, but again it remained safe and professional each and every time we interacted with them.” [1]
Both the U.S. and Chinese militaries have made it clear at the highest levels that they “do not want war” and want to avoid direct military conflict.
While formal communication mechanisms between the two militaries (e.g., the China-U.S. Military Maritime Consultative Agreement meetings, Defense Policy Coordination Talk, and China-U.S. Theater Commanders Talk) were interrupted after Nancy Pelosi’s Visit to Taiwan, there are other channels of communication between frontline commanders, such as the Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, 1972 (COLREGs), and the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea (CUES), which was adopted in 2014.
High-level exchanges between the U.S. and Chinese militaries have also been slowly restarting since President Xi Jinping had a meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden in Bali. Overall, the situation of China-U.S. air and sea encounters is not as dire as portrayed by the media and some scholars.
▲ Four scenarios for confrontational encounters between China and the United States
However, under certain circumstances, the risk of conflict could run high. When the United States and China talk about military frictions or dangerous encounters and blame each other, the first thing we should be clear about is where these frictions or encounters are taking place. For both sides, air and sea encounters in different areas have different legal and political implications. Most confrontational encounters between China and U.S. military forces occur under the following four scenarios.
1. When U.S. forces approach the territorial waters and airspace of mainland China or Hainan Island, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) reacts vigorously, taking such actions as interception or forcing out.
2. U.S. forces enter the territorial waters and airspace of the Xisha Islands to carry out so-called FONOPs and are warned and driven away by the PLA.
3. When the U.S. military conducted FONOPs within 12 nautical miles of China-controlled islands and reefs in the Nansha Islands and Huangyan Island, The PLA warned and drove away the U.S. military. For example, on September 30, 2018, the USS Decatur conducted a so-called FONOP in the waters near Nansha Islands’ Nanxun Reef and had a close encounter with a Chinese warship. The two ships were only 40 meters apart at their closest.
4. Both China and the United States engage in close reconnaissance of each other’s military forces during military exercises, including live ammunition exercises. While mutual tracking and surveillance of military activities are common, the reconnaissance operations conducted by the U.S. military sometimes come dangerously close.
Particularly during the PLA’s live ammunition exercises, the U.S. military often disregards the no-entry notices and unlawfully enters the relevant sea and airspace. For example, in August 2020, a U.S. U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft intruded into the PLA’s Northern Theater Command’s live ammunition exercise airspace, and an accident was barely avoided.
▲ China has legitimate concerns about the close encounters between Chinese and U.S. naval and air forces
While China is dissatisfied with the U.S. military’s actions in the waters near China and believes that the root cause of the encounters at sea and in the air is the aggressively close reconnaissance and other targeted military operations conducted by the U.S. military, it nevertheless tracks and monitors the U.S. military in accordance with international conventions, which is no different from reciprocal reactions of U.S. and Japan for China.
China only reacts more strongly in the four above-mentioned types of military encounters, which is in line with international common sense. Any country would take all feasible measures to safeguard its territorial, sovereign, and platform security against any actions that attempt to approach its territorial waters and airspace or pose a threat to its training exercises.
Strategically, China opposes the continuous challenges posed by the U.S. to China’s sovereignty over islands and reefs and its national security. Technically or in specific actions, China opposes actions by the U.S. that endanger the safety of personnel onshore at sea and in the air. In addition to strategic and legal differences, China also has three legitimate concerns:
First, some of the U.S. military’s reconnaissance missions are too close to China and overly provocative.
For example, on September 4, 2021, a U.S. RC-135S Cobra Ball missile surveillance aircraft approached Jiaozhou Bay in Shandong Province for close reconnaissance, with its closest point of approach to the Chinese territorial baseline being less than 20 nautical miles. On December 8, 2022, a U.S. P-8A anti-submarine patrol aircraft flew over the Taiwan Strait, at times with a distance of less than 13 nautical miles from the Chinese territorial baseline.
Second, China has reasons to be concerned about frequent accidents involving the U.S. military. In recent years, the high frequency of U.S. military operations and the negative impact on training and proficiency have led to numerous unfortunate accidents (such as the collision incident involving the U.S. Navy’s USS Fitzgerald missile destroyer in 2017).
When the Chinese and American militaries come into close proximity, the possibility of accidental incidents occurring due to a decline in the professionalism of the U.S. military is increasing.
Third, the United States has intensified the public hype and politicization of encounters at sea and in the air and military actions. In recent years, the United States has amplified the political and diplomatic implications of its military actions, with the most iconic examples being the so-called FONOPs carried out by the U.S. military within 12 nautical miles of China-controlled islands in the South China Sea and its transits through the Taiwan Strait.
On October 27, 2015, the U.S. destroyer USS Lassen conducted a highly publicized FONOP in the waters near the Nansha Islands. Although the U.S. had previously conducted such activities in the South China Sea, they were rarely so open and high-profile. The same is true for U.S. transits through the Taiwan Strait. Since 2018, after each transit through the Taiwan Strait, the U.S. Navy would either feed information to the media or directly issue announcements, claiming to “maintain freedom and openness in the Indo-Pacific region”. Such hype and politicization have increased the complexity and difficulty of military communication between China and the U.S. and added to the risks of encounters between Chinese and American naval and aerial forces.
[1]Note: the original essay wrongly attributed the above quote to Rear Adm. J.T. Anderson, this newsletter corrected the inaccuracy.
You smile, bank the check and say thank you! I had a very small role in the Spiderman movie starring Emma Stone. The scene never made it into the final cut. It wasn’t necessary for the story line. But I got paid union rate and residuals and spent a very pleasant afternoon and evening filming a 2 person scene with Emma Stone, who was absolutely delightful and charming. No complaints. And they sent me the specially designed movie baseball cap. I was treated as a professional and my contribution was valued at the time of filming.
In many western nations it fails on both counts. What they have left is an electoral system that goes through the motions. I remember a module on Law I did at UCL. It’s an elected dictatorship mostly. Before you screech but you’re in China, yeah but I was born in the UK. I watche the 1997 election (too young to vote) participated in 2001, 2005, 2010 and sat out 2015. I had left the UK by 2017 and 2019.
We can go through the common failings:
We can vote out those who fail!
We can freely criticise our leaders!
We can vote somebody in new and different!
Western systems ensure the BEST standards of living
Western systems are accountable!
Western systems ensure the most capable people!
We can vote out those who fail!
Except you don’t. The Labour regime of from 1997 to 2010 didn’t really achieve anything. They had some decent literacy programmes with the gremlins campaign but this was dismantled by the late 00s.
We can freely criticise our leaders!
Less so now, the UK has massively restricted free speech since the 80s, it has massively restricted protest. And guess what? Call the current prime minister a bum what happens NOTHING to you and NOTHING to them.
We can vote somebody in new and different!
Except it’s a false choice. You can choose a Neoliberal or a Neoliberal. The policies are a venn diagram that is a circle.
Western systems ensure the BEST standards of living
Maybe in the past 70s, 80s maybe the 90s. But once it got Neoliberalised productivity got disconnected from wages and there’s been a massive stagnation.
Western systems are accountable!
Yeah, they apologise or say let’s draw a line under it and then simply ignore it. I still remember Blunkett UK MP (EDIT) simply saying I don’t accept that to dismiss a well crafted argument against him.
Western systems ensure the most capable people!
No it ensures popular people. The UK’s Johnson for instance. What qualities other than being popular did he have?
Now let’s return to the above:
For the people.
For the people, are your lives REALLY getting better? My life in the UK:
Access to medical care: As a child I remember being able to get appointments with Dr Sharma same day for the times I was ill. As a teenager when I was beaten up, I could be admitted to hospital pretty quickly. Nose operations to put it back were done in as little as week. Into my 20s. It became increasingly difficult. Barriers kept being put up to see my GP. First off it was you had to book a day in advance, then a week in advance. By the early 00s. My GP had a 10 minute window at 8am to book appointments. There were 10 available a day.
My commute times : Each year it took longer and longer. I recall sitting in my dad’s car. To get to the big city nearby it was 20 minutes door to door. We moved a couple miles East but by the mid 00s it was taking 45 minutes and by the 2010s it was taking an hour each way door to door.
Policing There was a small police station in my dad’s town. It was gone and consolidated by the mid 00s. My dad had things smashed and police would attend same day. By the 2010s they wouldn’t attend and simply give you a crime number.
Of the people.
There’s the odd outlier like Mahri Black? The youngest MP ever. But the trend is establishment candidates. Only those backed by the party apparatchik have any chance of success. Tons of people like Lord Binhead try.. or the Monster Raving Loony Party try but always lose their deposits.
Sheltered, to begin with. In elementary school, I thought that friends who lived on Park Avenue were middle class.
One thing, though, that many don’t understand — not all of the students in these schools are rich. The schools generally offer financial aid, and many students are from upper middle class families. Increasingly, they have some poor children as well.
But of course there are lot of rich kids at them — kids who go skiing in the Swiss Alps, kids with household staffs, what have you. This can leave kids from middle class backgrounds thinking that they are poor.
The schools themselves — mine anyway —
Very high standards. You did not skip class, and you were not absent unless you were ill or there was a major crisis like a death in the family.
Very solid, college preparatory curriculum with lots of electives. Math and language classes were tracked by ability. The curriculum was accelerated to the point at which many students went to college after their junior year — there just wasn’t much left to do.
No bad teachers; they ranged from good to superb.
Few bad students. Admission was competitive and those who couldn’t handle the work were asked to leave. All students went to college, any or most to Ivies or similar, and most got advanced degrees.
Small class sizes. Ours were about 15. Teachers had low course loads, and latitude in what and how they taught — no submitting lesson plans. And they could focus on teaching, rather on lunchroom duty and such.
No “teaching to the test.” But then, such a thing didn’t exist when I was in school.
That said, there was good prep for the SAT’s. This can’t make a dramatic difference in scores, less than 100 points, but it can make some.
Beautiful campus, also like a small college. Here’s where I went to school — that’s the library building:
9. Excellent facilities.
10. No bells, etc. But very high standards of behavior. You didn’t arrive to class late, and there were no fights or anything of the sort.
11. A friend who transferred in from public school told me that he was delighted to be at a school where the teachers actually liked the kids!
12. I recall visiting my cousin’s public school when we were juniors and was appalled at the way the kids were treated by the administration. Obnoxious.
13. Smart kids were admired rather than bullied or looked down upon.
14. Today, there is a lot of pressure on the kids to get into a top college. Less so in my day. In any case, the schools are feeder schools, known to top colleges. At my school, for example, six kids went to Yale every year. Not five, not seven — they had six slots set aside.
15. The quality of the students was remarkable — probably more so at privates that cater specifically to the children of the rich. Out of a class of 100, one of my classmates became the first female editor of The New York Times. One became a philosophy professor at Cambridge, the other at Harvard. Another became a physicist. Most became doctors and lawyers. (Only three of us, I being one of them, became engineers.) One of the lawyers worked for President Obama. Etc.
16. I asked a former teacher why it was that, on a standardized test administered to students in New York City, the public school students did better than the private school students, but that in life, the private schools students did better, and he said it was simple — the private schools taught the students to think. They don’t stuff your head full of facts like a public school, but you can write an essay or prove a theorem.
In retrospect, if there was a downside, it’s that we were so sheltered. But overall, my experience was just about as good as it could be, within our current educational framework and given the requirements set by the colleges. I wish that every student could enjoy a similar experience.
There is no threat to the Chinese political system. 95% of Chinese support China and its government. People live longer, today their life expectancy is 78 years old and the U.S. is 2 full years lower at 76 years old! They live better lives. Their real standard of living less inflation has grown 30 times in 40 years. Meanwhile during the same time. The U.S. real standard of living not only not grow. It deteriorated back 20 years into the 1960 level!
Chinese has full universal healthcare coverage and college education is free of charge if one qualifies for it. All of which is not free in the U.S. and close to a third of Americans are not covered by healthcare and may die if they fall sick! That is the U.S. not China! Kids gets into college debts before they even start life in the world.
So who want to change their political system? Well by trust on government measurement carried out by trusted western research in the west showed Chinese trust their government 95% and only 30% of American’s trust their government!
And your question is what is the biggest threat to the Chinese political establishment? Not what is the biggest threat to the so call US liberal democracy? Why do you not ask the obvious? And why do you worry about a non issue? Where is your intellect? Where is you rationality and sanity?
Ok I get it you are a China and Chinese hater and you term communism as a slur to demonised China. But let me help you. 87% of the world don’t buy your shit. Sure the 13% westerners may be fooled by your media but even that a higher proportion of westerners are smarter than you. They know this is a nonsense question. But I addressed it to call you out. If you can ask this question you don’t amount to much.
What was odd thirty years ago, is my new normal, but here are a few random remembrances from 1990 Germany, 6 months after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Brutal truth rewarded me when I asked “how are you?”. Replies weren’t always “great”, “awesome” or “just fine thank you.” Germans actually thought I cared (and eventually I learned not to ask if I didn’t).
Germans are direct. They don’t beat around the bush. When they have an opinion they share it with you. And they expect you respect it and deliver honesty in return. Political correctness was non-existent.
Service workers didn’t smile and chirp sugar-coated pleasantries. Shop attendants ignored me unless I asked for help. Restaurant meals were uninterrupted by the obligatory-every-five-minute repetition of “is everything OK?” I learned to ask for the bill rather than wait for it.
Smiling at strangers often seemed to discomfort them. I soon learned to recognize when a smile was welcome and when not.
Football (soccer for me at the time) rules. The 1990 World Cup began soon after I arrived. During games the world stopped. Loud cheers or groans occasionally livened up silent and traffic free downtown streets. As games ended, streets filled with honking cars waving huge flags (Italian, Spanish, Brazilian, Romanian and of course German).
I thought the Super Bowl huge, but the World Cup is much bigger.
Sporting events and television programs were advertising free. Ads appeared only between scheduled programming.
Everything was expensive. A used car with over 80,000 miles cost more than a new Hyundai in the US. A pair of brand name jeans cost 3 times more.
The electronics store salesman spent an hour trying to talk me out of a Toshiba television and a Samsung microwave. He insisted Asian goods broke as soon as the 2 year warranty expired. (The microwave is still going strong 30 years later, and the TV was only replaced because it was no longer smart enough for the digital age).
Nobody ever asked me about my religion or my profession, but damn were they curious about life in America.
Talking about money or charity is taboo.
Alcohol was everywhere. It was common to see people drink beer in the park or walking down the street. Lunch usually included a beer or carafe of wine.
There was no free water in the restaurants. And soft drinks were more expensive than beer. All drinks are served without ice.
Nobody littered! The public waste bins were emptied daily.
Germans pedestrians wait for a red light to turn green even on a deserted street at midnight.
Zebra-striped crosswalks get the same respect as stopped school buses in the US.
I was never asked to show ID to prove myself of legal drinking age. Sixteen-year-olds are allowed to drink wine and beer (even in a bar).
Magazines at the supermarket checkout featured naked breasts (no longer).
Shops closed at 6.30 p.m. on weekdays, 2 p.m. on Saturday and were all closed on Sunday (this has changed).
There were only three types of soda on offer, Coke, Fanta and Sprite (the selection is slightly larger now – but nothing like in the US).
Bagels and donuts were not to be found (that has changed too).
Bread was light on air and heavy on grains. My digestion became like an alarm clock.
Cities and streets are designed for pedestrians, bicycles and public transport – not for cars. Pedestrian zones are everywhere, parking is in expensive garages.
Downtown streets aren’t straight. They wander among the buildings and sites. Highways don’t mention north, south, east or west. They only tell you what towns and cities are ahead on the route.
Restaurant meals took hours not minutes and lack of television in the restaurants forced me to communicate with my friends. Meal portions were smaller and menus much more varied. Chain restaurants were rare. Tipping was optional and the wait staff gets 20 days of paid vacation.
Dogs are allowed in restaurants.
German flags were only displayed during the World Cup.
Everybody took a one hour lunch break and left work promptly before 5.30. People took three or four week vacations and left work behind.
Construction workers drank beer during their morning break. Obesity was unusual, beer bellies were not.
People walked for fun, but nobody seemed to run for fitness.
Some women at the pool sunbathed topless. Young children at the pool often wore nothing.
Public transport was immaculately clean and ran on time.
Brothels are legal.
Nobody ever seemed to get shot (though there were plenty of stabbings in Frankfurt where I lived).
Gas was four to five times more expensive than in the US.
My hour lunch break is over now. I’ll add to this if anything else occurs to me.
Back in the 70s, when smoking was legal almost anywhere except elevators. I stepped into an elevator in an office building with a coworker when another person stepped right in as the doors closed, smoking a cigarette. I pointed out it was illegal to smoke on an elevator and she replied, “what are you going to do, call the police?” My coworker, who happened to be a reserve police officer, pulled out his badge and said, “that won’t be necessary.”
Ah, I still remember her expression.
Varginha UFO Crash: Alien Contact, Government Denial and Coverup
You must be joking!!! I don’t understand how you could be unaware. China has been the target of massive anti-China propaganda in Western media for years.
And not only in mainstream media but in social media like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and here on Quora.
Curiously, there are very few positive stories about China in Western media. They’re nearly all negative! How can that be?
Can a country that…
built the world’s largest economy from scratch within 40 years
lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty
created the world’s finest infrastructure of roads, bridges, high-speed rail, airports, etc.
landed on the dark side of the moon
sent an ambitious space mission to Mars
built the spectacular BeiDou navigation satellite system
reforested 34 million acres of land
produces the most renewable energy in the world
created the world’s best 5G technology
sent pandemic aid to dozens of countries around the world
…have practically nothing positive to report on at all?
Well, that’s what the American (Western) narrative is.
China don’t throw innocent people into jail like the how U.S. cook up some shit and throw the Huawei CEO daughter in jail in Canada. The 2 Michael’s are spies and doing things in China to hurt China and the Chinese people to spy for the 5 eyes. These are facts. These are self confessed facts. Canada, do the honourable think and apologise to China and the Chinese people.
Canada you are a hypocrite and a liar. You cohort with all the media to claim that they were innocent. Well they now says in their own free speech that they spied for you! You are lucky China don’t sentence them to death. China ought to. China should do. After all what they do could kill many Chinese.
The time that a white persons life is worth more than another race belongs to the 19th century today. We should sue every media that claims the Michael’s are innocent. We should end every journalist that lied. We should fine the media and politicians so hard the will never dare to lie again. Caucasians do the right thing. Do you like to be lied to? Again and again and again?
I thought that freedom of speech is so vital to you. And surely you want the truth, nothing but the truth? Why the hell are you keeping quiet? CNN and BBC. Why are you quiet as a mouse? Lying News channel?
I raised a young family in the 1970’s as a TV repairman. Made good money. TV’s were so unreliable there was a TV shop on every other street corner. Drug stores had a vacuum tube tester for DIY’ers (You can’t guess how many service calls I made where the customer had a bag of tubes they took out to test but didn’t have brains enough to read the tube layout on the inside of the cabinet to return them in the proper place.) When the RCA XL100 came out as one of the first solid state TV’s, repairs started a slow decline. When integrated circuits became the norm, the bottom opened. Microprocessors blew the bottom away.
Drive down ANY 5 streets and tell me how many TV repair shops you can find. Go ahead, I’ll wait………..
I saw the handwriting on the wall, jumped into early PC repair, became an electronics teacher, saw the build you own PC market crash, got into networking, watched Cisco plummet in the 90’s, did cyber security and retired. Modern TV’s are far superior to any previous generation by my firsthand experience. Not to mention a color tv in 1960 cost $300 – 500 dollars. Do the math with inflation vs any brand of 40″ flat screen. Be amazed.
This is what fed my wife and daughter for 12 years.
Because I got married and had her very early in my 20s, at that time, none of my friends had kids. My baby was the sweetheart for all the aunties – mom’s three close friends. We threw her a party.
It was fun. Each auntie got her a present. They handed it to her one by one so she opened it and got excited. To the last auntie, before she handed the present to my daughter, she ‘demanded’ my girl, “Say ‘please’ and bow, so auntie will give you the gift!”.
I thought she was joking, so I interrupted and told my daughter, “Auntie got you a present, you say ‘Thank you’ out loud!”.
My daughter exclaimed, “Thank you auntie!”, then opened the present.
It was a Lego Friends set. Needless to say, my daughter was so happy, and jumped up and down with the Lego set.
Then suddenly, the auntie snatched the Lego set from my daughter’s hands again, held it up above her head, and demanded my daughter, “Say ‘please’ and bow, or auntie’s gonna take it back!”.
This time, I knew she wasn’t joking.
I got angry but tried very hard to keep my voice calm, “No one demands my daughter to beg. We’re poor but we are not cheap”. “I was just joking!”, she said. “No, you weren’t.
That’s the second time and I don’t like it”, I told her.
Now she got angry, raised her voice with me, “Even so, this is an expensive toy, what wrong with begging a little?”. “You take the gift back and please leave”, I told her, while getting up and holding the door open.
She left and never came back.
The next day, I took my daughter to the toy store to get that Lego set. My friend was right. It was a damn expensive toy, it cost me a big chunk of my skinny paycheck and a friendship.
Of course it is the U.S. but to be fair the U.S. is the biggest threat to the entire world. China included. And the world. As a whole the world need to jointly and severally stop the U.S. excesses. I dare say for the good of the human race including the Americans.
The U.S. is the only nation that will push human into extinction through an all out nuclear war if uncheck. We humanoids on earth need to be very mindful of this fact and the U.S. powers must be checkmate at every turn and ever aspect. Militarily, politically, financially, economically and strategically.
The U.S. must be brought back into being a member of responsible human society where the common good of humanity must prevail over the selfish interest of the U.S. military industrial complex profiting from wars, chaos and violence worldwide.
China is a very peaceful loving nation and it survived 5000 years because it has a peaceful coexistence between nations as a priority. China don’t want enemies and certainly do not like war. Since 1979 some 44 years has passed since China last fought a war. But during that time China phenomenally grew rich and strong to deter any nation from threatening them.
China wants a peaceful world where we can live peacefully and harmoniously. We can all get prosperous and live better and longer lives. And we trade with each other. Today there are only some 12–15 nations that are part of these war threatening pack. Most of them are either forced into this pack as slave vassal states or coerced or bribed into this grouping. Glued together by the U.S. and the western media, this loosely defined as western powers need to be dismantled for good.
Chinese history
Cajun Beef Po’boy Sandwiches with Red Eye Gravy
For Cajun Beef Po’boy Sandwiches with Red Eye Gravy, sirloin steak is rubbed with espresso coffee powder and pepper, then broiled to perfection. Red Eye Gravy is added to the steak.
Ingredients
Po’boys
1 (1 pound) beef top sirloin steak, cut 1 inch thick
6 teaspoons espresso coffee powder, divided
1/2 teaspoon pepper
4 large French bread rolls, split
8 slices tomato
1 cup shredded lettuce
Redeye Gravy
3 tablespoons butter, divided
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1/4 cup diced tasso or pancetta ham
1/4 cup diced onion
1 tablespoon Creole Seasoning
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1/3 cup hot water
2 cups beef stock
1 to 2 tablespoons hot pepper sauce (Louisiana-style)
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
Instructions
Rub beef top sirloin steak with 2 teaspoons espresso powder and pepper.
Heat broiler to HIGH.
Place steak on rack on aluminum foil-lined broiler pan so surface of beef is 3 to 4 inches from heat. Broil for 16 to 21 minutes for medium rare (145 degrees F) doneness, turning once.
Meanwhile, melt 2 tablespoons butter in large skillet over medium heat; whisk in flour. Cook for 8 to 10 minutes until caramel color, whisking often. Remove mixture from pan; set aside.
Melt remaining tablespoon butter in same skillet over medium heat; add tasso, onion, Creole Seasoning and garlic; cook for 10 minutes until onion is translucent.
Dissolve remaining 4 teaspoons espresso powder in hot water; add to skillet and cook for 1 to 2 minutes until browned bits attached to skillet are dissolved and sauce is reduced almost completely.
Whisk in butter mixture until smooth.
Add beef stock, hot sauce and Worcestershire; bring to a boil. Reduce and simmer for 15 to 20 minutes or until sauce is reduced to 1 cup.
Add roast beef to skillet. Cook for 3 to 5 minutes until heated through, stirring often so sauce coats beef.
Divide beef mixture between rolls. Top beef with tomato and lettuce. Close sandwiches.
There is no need to answer such boring questions anymore.
All infrastructure in China, including logistics, communication, power supply, water supply, and gas supply, is very complete.
In 2021, China produced 8.5 petawatt-hour (Pwh) of electricity, approximately 30% of the world’s electricity production.
There are two most advanced transmission technologies in the world, one called “ultra-high voltage transmission” and the other called “flexible direct current transmission“. China is far ahead of other countries in these two top technologies.
Overhead power lines can easily cause fires and can also lead to power outages.
Outdoor power poles and overhead power lines in China have been basically cleaned up during the renovation of old cities, and all cables have been buried underground without any exposed or disorderly phenomena.
If you have traveled to cities in Taiwan, Japan and Chinese Mainland, you will find that only cities in Chinese Mainland rarely see bare overhead power lines.
I haven’t experienced a power outage in China for 40 years.
Young people born in China after 1990 may not even understand what it feels like to have a power outage.
In China, even remote rural areas have stable electricity supply.
The Tibetan village at an altitude of 5000 meters has also been electrified.
But whether it’s India, Vietnam, or the United States or Europe, power outages are frequent.
The machines running in the factory require electricity, while the computers in the office require electricity. If the power supply is unstable, how do you make the enterprise work?
Taiwan’s power system has always had various problems. Taking TSMC as an example, due to a power outage in Tainan City, 30000 wafers on TSMC’s production line were damaged, resulting in a direct loss of US$200 million. No matter how rich TSMC’s finances are, it cannot withstand the losses caused by several major power outages.
Anyway, since you want to attract foreign investment, the first step is to ensure a stable electricity supply.
Otherwise, these enterprises will have to face downtime and production stoppage.
Through the the Belt and Road Project, China will help these countries improve their power systems and will actively transfer some enterprises to countries along the the Belt and Road.
China’s homegrown TP500 unmanned transport plane makes maiden flight, and transportation between Chinese cities will be faster in the future. Goods that originally took 3 days to arrive can be transported in 2-3 hours.
I was a workaholic, working 16 hour weekdays and 8 hour weekends. This was about 20 years ago.
It was Christmas eve, and I still hadn’t done my Christmas shopping, I had my list for everything, most of it specified by my nieces and nephews.
I had been reading how a few malls in our city were in trouble, as everyone was switching to big box stores to shop. They showed pictures of traffic jams in big box store parking lots. I was finally out of time and had to shop, and hope I could get the stuff on my list, at the last minute.
I pulled up to Sears at the local mall, that had been featured in the news, as being in trouble. The parking lot was empty. I was afraid it was closed. I parked in the closest parking spot to the door. I walked in and manager saw me enter, and was on me like glue. I was the only customer in the store, ON Christmas Eve!!
He asked me what I was looking for and I pulled out this long list. He smiled and called someone over to get me a hot chocolate from the mall, he sat me down in a recliner in the furniture section, and called two more workers over, and asked them to get the stuff on the list.
We talked, and I drank my hot chocolate. He was pretty sure Sears wouldn’t last another five years, and he needed it to, to collect his pension.
After about 15 minutes, the workers were back with my presents. I paid for them. They had a gift wrapping service, which normally cost extra, but he said that the staff weren’t doing anything anyway, so it would be free.
In another 10 minutes, they helped me load the wrapped presents in my car.
It was maybe 25 minutes from when I walked into the store, and I was done. Wrapped and everything.
I had almost never shopped at Sears, but after that I was a regular, until they closed the doors. I saw the manager until he successfully retired.
I later read that Sears ended up shorting the pension fund. I hope he made out OK, as I have never had service like that, before or since.
Just read this out to my wife and she burst out laughing. In 1996 I had been widowed over five years when a crazy woman burst through the door of our car sales site with so much enthusiasm and vibrance and chatter and said she wanted to buy a car. It was a quiet time so I stopped playing my guitar and set about helping her. She bought a car and left and I turned to my mate and said, ‘She’s totally bonkers’, he replied, ‘you’re telling me’, I replied, I could do with some of that’. I delivered the car a few days later and took her to the pub for a chat, after a few dates we were driving towards the Mersey tunnel, Merseyside from Wirral to Liverpool and I asked her if she would like to go on an adventure and her answer was yes, just then we entered the tunnel just as the petrol light came on, I said, ‘welcome to the adventure’.
We sold our houses, bought a B & B, called it ‘Firkin House’ and thirteen years later retired to sunny Cyprus and will have been married twenty years next May with lots of fun and laughs along the way.
Oh, boy. I’ll never forget this one as long as I live.
I had been living with my significant other for about four years. He always treated me well … but other people? Not so much. In this case, it was his grandparents, who I adored. They were just the sweetest people. They really loved their grandson, too, even though he rarely gave them the time of day. They wanted him to fly home for Christmas—I’d made plans with my family, so we were going solo that year.
Anyway, this guy refused to buy a plane ticket unless his grandparents paid for it. Here’s the kicker: he had the money to spend on plane fare. He just didn’t want to. A$$hole that he was. So, his grandfather, who was around 90, had said that he’d put the check in the mail. It hadn’t arrived, due to the holiday mail delay.
I bore witness to this guy browbeating his elderly grandpa into Fed-Exing another check over the phone. This was two days before the cut-off date to book the flight. So his grandfolks sent another check, because they wanted their grandson home for the holidays. These were old, frail people who barely got out of the house. Not good drivers. You know, why didn’t my S.O. just pay for the fare and let his grandfather pay him back once he was there?
A day or so after he left on the trip, his grandfather’s original check arrived in the mail. I looked at his spidery handwriting on the signature line, and I felt positively ill.
I ended up breaking up with my significant other because of that, and for countless other times that I’d seen him be really mean to other people who loved him—family members, even. I knew that one day, I could be next in line, and I wasn’t about to wait around for that to happen.
When I was first living with my (present) wife we were living in Nanshan. This is a suburb in Shenzhen, China. We had a little dog. She was a Bomei. The dog’s name was “yo yo”.
Well, my wife wanted to save some money and cut yo yo’s hair herself.
The only thing was… well… she was drinking alcohol when she did it.
Uh oh.
…
Poor yo yo.
She shaved it all off, and yo yo was so very, VERY pissed off.
She would go to the standing mirror, look at herself, sigh and then go back to her bed and sleep off her depression.
It was a long time ago. Maybe 2003 or 2004.
Poor little Yo Yo.
Trust me, everyone… a word to the wise… never cut your dog’s hair when you are drunk.
Europe had just emerged from a terrible Great War, and everyone wanted to cut the ties with the past. The World War One was simply a terrible disaster which cost the lives of millions of fine young men and destroyed gazillions worth of property. And the World War One effectively killed Christianity in Europe. The industrial mass carnage was simply too much.
Europe was wiped mentally and spiritually into a blank slate, and this also included fine arts and architecture. New Totalitarian ideologies, such as Communism, National Socialsism and Fascism had emerged, and the new generation hated anything bourgeoisie, anything hand-made, anything posh and cute, anything feminine. One of the most important men in the architecture of the era was Swiss-born Edouard Jeanneret aka Le Corbusier, whose pamphlet Towards a New Architecture was the start bang of the run of hideous, ugly and banal architecture.
Of course Corbu did not aim for hideous, ugly and banal. What he wanted was natural light, air, sanitation and effectiveness. The centuries old European cities had very little to speak about commodities – many did not have central heating, central water supply nor indoors loos. (They came only later.) And he wanted to make a total break with the 7000 years of architectural legacy. Not evolution, but revolution. this is how the box-arts architecture emerged.
According to Corbu, the problems of architecture are the same all around the world, and the solutions also are the same all around the world. Everything returns to the three basic forms – cube, cone and ball. Away with gabled roofs, decorations, ornaments, frizes, symmetry, anything unnecessary! Light! Warmth! Joy! Buildings are nothing but vertical streets! Sameness must prevail! Everything shall be the same from Arkhangelsk to Antofagasta!
Meanwhile in Germany, the Bauhaus sported similar ideas. While le Corbusier leaned towards Fascism, Bauhaus was a Communist hotbed. Everything shall be mass-produced! Away with pastel colours and genteel forms! Away with decorations and ornaments! Everything shall be standardized!
The new architecture – International Style– spred incredibly fast. Because the year 2000 was near. This was the future – and it did away with past. Everyone now waited for year 2000. It was to be a concrete milestone of the future. See, the odometre gears revolve and the new numbers set in. And the architects wanted to build bridge to the future.
Nazis and Fascists were enamored of the new style. Bauhaus was done away because it was a hotbed of Communists, but the Nazis adopted the Bauhaus style eagerly. Likewise in Italy, Futurism was the offficial style of Fascism in arts and Italian Rationalism in architecture. Not some kind of Neo-Classicism which one could expect.
Came the World War Two, and the cities in Britain, Netherlands, France, Germany and Eastern Europe were simply obliterated. They had to be rebuilt – and they were rebuilt in the new style. And a new technique of building – Plattenbau – had been invented. The large panel system-building revolutionized construction and made houses cheaper than ever.
But this meant also the revolution on architectural thinking. The old buildings had been built indefinitely, or at least as long as the razing craze, fire or aerial bombardment would destroy them. Now the concept of lifespan entered in architecture. Edifices would last 50 to 60 years after which they would be ready to be demolished and replaced. So there was no reason to build beautiful any more.
Two world wars had killed the artistic soul. The architecture must be true and honest. The world is ugly, so architecture must be ugly. The world is fragmented and broken, so the architecture must reflect it. The materials must be left raw and unfinished to be honest to them. Brutalism had been born.
And the future was closer than ever. The 1960s finally demonstrated the future was at hand. True, we didn’t know exactly what the future would be like, but we knew that it had to be one of a few alternatives. The future was a world with a distinct architecture. It had its own way of speaking. It had its own technology. It was for all intents and purposes a different land where people dressed differently, talked differently, ate differently, and even thought differently. It was where scientists were wizards, where machines were magically effective and efficient, where tyrants were at least romantically evil rather than banal, and where the crystal spires and togas would prevail.
Then the long-awaited Year 2000 (or rather 2001, if you prefer) came. The odometer wheels revolved and the numbers turned. Suddenly we realized we lived now in that future which we had built in the 1960s – and it was no different from the past. It is now 2023 – we are well in that future – and nothing has really changed. The world did not change by revolution, but by evolution. Meanwhile, the centuries- and millennia-old towns, cities and buildings had evolved by constructing modern age amenities within – without destruction, simply by building waterworks, sanitation and Internet connections within those buildings built centuries ago and made to last for centuries. Evolution 1 – revolution 0. “Building a bridge to the future” sounds just as corny as building a causeway to next Tuesday.
For people of the generations who had lived through the tarnished promises of the Atomic Age, the Space Age, the Computer Age, and the This That and Another Age, the year 2001 was a gateway. We waited twenty, thirty, forty years and some longer to pass though that gate into a time when spaceships the size of ocean liners plied between colonised planets, where cities were colourful collections of brand new towers without a single old building or blade of grass.
Turned out the future was hideous, banal, bland, ugly and simply terrifying. And it was not the future anymore. It was now. The future was now here, and had become the present. We no more had a past, and we no more have a future either – what we have is perpetual present, here and now. The years turn and nothing really changes. Or should I say, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
And now the lifespan thinking in architecture is bearing fruit – we are losing those futures now. The Brutalist and the Plattenbau buildings are now reaching the ends of their designed lifespans, and they are being pulled down. Every day we lose one or more of those futures. Most of us say good riddance – nobody except arts and history professionals will miss those ugly, hideous and banal buildings like we miss the destroyed beautiful buildings of the past centuries.
Here goes the Vesiputoustalo (Waterfall House) in my hometown. Built in 1985, it was abandoned in 2017 and demolished 2022. The house had a terrible mildew and internal air problem, and had a functional lifespan of barely 32 years. Another future becomes a heap of gravel.
So why our world is still plagued with ugly architecture despite having more architectrs now than ever in history? Because the doctrines of Modernism and International Style still prevail in all architectural schools and technical universities in the world. The students are still today indoctrinated to build that same hideous architecture as has been built during the past 90 years. Repeat styles are not allowed unless they repeat the past 50 years.
And yet, all futures have now been explored. The same has happened in architecture as what happened in the fine arts in the 1970s. All isms have been tried and all turned stale. Like Gollum, we have now explored all the roots and all the caves and they turned empty. This general disillusionment has now produced the spiritless and soulless Postmodernist architecture. Anything goes.
Most of all, it is all about money. Building ugly is cheap. Cutting corners and cutting away anything unnecessary is a way on saving money and on costs.
The dreams of le Corbusier and other Modernists turned out nightmares in the real life.
Leave The West! Move To China Now!
Like it or not, Russia and China are running circles around the USA. Better learn Mandarin and Russian. We love you Sabrina!
Creole-Style Pork and Red Bean Chili
On a spiciness scale of 1 (mild) to 5 (hot), this chili is a 3 with chaurice only or a 2 with pork tenderloin and chaurice combined.
Prep: 15 min | Cook: 55 min | Yield: 6 to 8 servings
Ingredients
1 teaspoon vegetable oil
2 pounds chaurice sausage (or other spicy pork sausage, like chorizo), removed from casing*
2 cups finely diced yellow onion
1 cup diced celery
1 cup finely diced green bell pepper
3 cups cooked Camellia Brand Red Kidney Beans
2 teaspoons dried thyme leaves
3 (14.5 ounce) cans fire-roasted diced tomatoes
4 large cloves garlic, minced
1 to 2 tablespoons Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Pork & Veal Magic
1/4 cup tomato paste
2 cups thinly sliced green onion tops
Kosher salt, to taste
Fresh thyme leaves, for garnish
Instructions
Heat oil in a large Dutch oven set at medium-high. Add the chaurice sausage, and, using a wooden spoon, break up the sausage into bite-size chunks. Stir and cook until the sausage is fully opaque, about 8 minutes. (If also using pork tenderloin, do not add yet.)
Add onion and cook until translucent, about 6 minutes.
Add celery and bell pepper and cook until soft, about 5 minutes.
Add Camellia Brand Red Kidney Beans, dried thyme, tomatoes, garlic, and Pork & Veal Magic®. (If using diced pork tenderloin, add it at this time.) Bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat to medium-low and cook until slightly thickened, about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Add tomato paste and stir until thoroughly combined, taking care not to break up the beans. Bring chili to a boil, stir in green onions and add Kosher salt to taste. Cover, remove from heat and let stand for 20 minutes before serving.
Garnish individual bowls of chili with fresh thyme leaves.
Notes
* For a milder flavor, use 1 pound chaurice and 1 pound pork tenderloin, diced.
Me, wearing a Best Buy shirt and buying something from the 7–11 down the street: “Hello”
7–11 owner: “Oh hi, how are you today!”
Me: “Pretty good I guess. Best Buy isn’t giving me enough hours though.”
Owner: “Do you want to work here?”
Me: “…yes, actually.”
Owner: “Can you start tomorrow at 6am?”
Me: “…yes, actually.”
Owner: “OK, see you then.”
Now, to be fair, at that point I’d been in that particular 7–11 maybe 3 times a week for 3 years leading up to then, and I knew the owner and his family decently well.
But still. I went in to buy cigarettes and left with a new job. Pretty nice.
Russia-US security agreement. Conflict on two fronts w/ Jeffrey Sachs (Live)
We, fortunately, have not yet had a house fire, but some neighbors of my daughter did. The whole family was at a movie and arrived home to find their house on fire, and firemen already battling the blaze. The house was saved, but there was extensive and very expensive damage, making the house uninhabitable for months. The fire had started from a clothes dryer left running, and a blockage caused the motor to overheat.
Since then, I have two rules: Never leave the house with the dryer running, and also, clean, not only the dryer vent after every load, but also the dryer line to the outside on a regular basis.
I also, at one time, prevented a major fire at work when I smelled overheated electrical wires. I had a great deal of difficulty persuading the maintenance people to cut a hole in the ceiling where I could smell the wires, but they finally did, just as the flames erupted.
As on date there is an oversupply of 17.2 Million Homes in China
There are 17 Million homes built or being built without takers , built in anticipation of being sold for which developers have already borrowed loans
The Cumulative loans on them are around 3.4 Trillion RMB ($ 500 Billion) needing interest payments of around 165 Billion RMB a year
There are a further 35 Million Units built or being built with takers but which haven’t been concluded and with at least 50% payment pending
The Cumulative burden of these units is around 6 Million RMB ($ 813 Billion)
88% of these Homes are in the Top Cities – Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen etc
That’s $ 1.3 Trillion worth of homes waiting to be sold or fully sold
The Reasons for the lack of demand include :-
Very tough requirements to avail mortgage loans since 2018
Restrictions on Second and Third Home ownership since 2020 as part of Common Prosperity
Tier 2 and 3 Cities developing very fast and real estate much more affordable. In Chongqing City i can buy 143 Sqm for 1.625 Million RMB against a mere 52.5 Sqm in Shanghai
General lack of faith in Residential Property as a source of Investment anymore
Yes Chinas worst case scenario is a $ 1.3 Trillion HIT assuming China decides to burn the entire issue and pay for all these units and plug the hole
However since China won’t raise debt to pay off the hole like US or India would, it means Chinas strategy will be long term and that will take at least 6 years or until 2028 to absorb this amount effectively and cost maybe 1.5% a year in growth (Hence around 4–4.2% instead of 5.7% a year for the next few years)
China could raise 10 Trillion Debt and plug the hole fully tomorrow. It is the only nation on earth that can do so. Yet if it does, it begins to follow the US into a path of no return which China, a producer economy doesn’t want to do
Good news is today, there is no fresh problem
The old problem has to be sorted out and that will take a few more years
This Is Why So Many Women Are Single
” I’m loyal, but I am not monogamous” ” I’m loyal , but I am bisexual ” ” I’m loyal , but I have all my exes in my DMs to this day” ” I’m loyal , but I do OF ” To me , the reason why a lot of these ladies are single/ in pseudo relationships is because they don’t know what the word loyal means .
Two years ago, my son moved from the UK to the US (Texas). He works in IT (network engineer). His salary now is more than double of what he made in the UK. He got married last October and his wife works a minimum wage job. Yet, combined they make more now than me and my wife ever did.
So, you would think that he’s now better off than when he worked in Britain. Think again.
Healthcare costs a fortune. Last month, my daughter in law needed emergency dental surgery (root canal). Co-pay 3,000 USD.
Since he’s a recent immigrant, his credit score is not all that great. Meaning he can’t get a mortgage to buy a home. So, they’re paying 2K pcm in rent.
Since public transport in the US is either in a shocking state or non-existant, they both need cars to get to/from work. Cost of buying/running/insuring something decent is substantial.
Utilities are generally more expensive. The monthly electricity bill in particular is high (because living in Texas means you run the AC pretty much all of the time).
Food prices are about the same, though the portions are larger. Quality is a lot lower. Steaks in particular: all water and hormones. Sugar in everything.
So while is monthly gross pay is higher than this side of the Atlantic, his monthly disposable income (after all the bills are paid) is a lot less. It would be fair to say that they live paycheck to paycheck most months. When my son and his family want to come over for a visit, we pay for their trip. Whilst he’s a real go-getter and loves his job (and the opportunities he has in the US) my daughter in law is beginning to realise that they would enjoy a superior quality of life in Europe.
I worked n the restaurant business on and off for around 15 years. In all that time, I was lucky enough to work with good hard working people. There was only one person I will never forgive, a person who I worked with who I thought was a friend. We used to tend bar together on busy nights and we made pretty good money. There used to be a group of guys on a bowling team who would come in once a week a they always left us a large tip. I remember after they left I was cleaning up the bar and noticed there wasn’t their usual tip there. I asked “my friend “ if she took the tip off of the bar and she said no. I didn’t think much about it until the owner of the bar pulled me aside and told me my coworker told him I pocketed the tip. I’m many things , but I’m not a thief. She eventually admitted to stealing tips because she was in a lot of debt. She was fired
“Can you help us save him? the nurse asks. “He’s failing fast. Not responding to medication. We have nothing more here to keep him alive.”
“What do you mean?” I say. “ You mean the doctor can’t give him more drugs? Please, please.”
“Who’s at home? Does he have a favourite stuffy? What about a pet? Think about it and let us know.” The nurse is detached and unemotional.
And I’m falling apart.
It is a cold, blustery winter morning in January, 1984. Winters in Northwest Canada can be brutal and this week was especially miserable. The wind heaped the snow in large drifts around the house; not our house, mind you. Living at the in-laws. A devastating fire a short time ago. I say, “Good to remind us how the homeless live.” There is no time to feel sorry for ourselves.
“Shh, shh, baby, my baby, shh.” I sing as I rock back and forth to calm him down.
His arms flail. He lets out a piercing scream. Growls. Racks my face. Finds my eyes and claws at my eyeballs.
Our family physician writes on his prescription slip: Query spinal meningitis. Sends baby and me to a paediatrician. “This is an acute emergency,” he says calmly. “Your appointment’s made.”
Hysteria rises in me. My legs turn to jelly. The sound roaring in my ears is deafening.
And baby son lies still. Pale. Too still. Pale. Deathly still.
Another race against time. I remember a small crowded room of bored patients. I remember a nurse calling my son’s name. And I also remember rushing down a flight of stairs, throwing open a door, and racing into a crowded street.
My husband looks wide-eyed at us.
“Go. Go. Go. He’s dying. Oh my God, he’s dying. Hurry to the General.”
We screech to a halt in front of the hospital. I stumble awkwardly nearly blinded by tears flowing freely now. The specialist, just seen, races by with his doctor’s bag in hand.
I run into the hospital and a front desk clerk gestures towards the elevator. “Run. They’re ready.”
We call for the resident priest.
“Please baptize him.” I choke on my words then. “And give him the Last Rites if need be.”
Life stands still at times like this. Husband and I huddle together, entwined branches of a single tree. We sit in parallel, silent prayer begging God for mercy. We’ve waited thirteen years for our little boy, a son who will carry on a dying family name. We can’t bear the thought of losing him today.
Hours later, after his abdominal surgery, the attending doctor walks towards us. We search his weary face, but find no answers. His words come haltingly.
“The fight’s just begun. Your son is critically ill. “
He quickly describes our son’s diagnosis, surgical procedures, present condition.
Intussusception. Bowel blockage caused the small intestine to telescope into the large intestine. There was total blockage. The surgeon made an incision in his belly and removed eighteen inches.
Tells us finally that our son’s odds of survival: ten percent.
Ten percent? We prop each other up, slump over in our chairs, cover our faces, and cry.
The next week is a blur. I call my mom and beg for prayers. She phones everyone she knows. Holds prayer gatherings at her home a couple times weekly for a month. Attends Mass and asks the priest if she can address the congregation at each of four Sunday Masses. Continues to give updates to her various support groups.
There are new developments daily. Our tike is a fighter. He is watched around the clock by rotating nurses who hang over his crib. When he starts yanking out tubes, his hands are tied together with cotton restraints. The staff won’t listen to my pleas. “I’ll sit here all day, all night holding his hands, but please don’t tie him up.”
They send me home. “You’ve got to sleep. You can’t save him all by yourself. Trust us.”
But he gets worse. Lies listless.
Still. Pale. Too still. Pale. Deathly still.
Then, without warning, cardiac arrest.
Husband and I pass a crash cart on the way back from the cafeteria. Not for a moment do we think it comes from our son’s room. We are oblivious to the gravity of his condition until the doctor intercepts us. “Your son’s heart stopped. But he’s fine. We did our job.”
Suddenly our son is floundering once more. The medical staff run out of answers and I can see the troubled look in their eyes.
“Any suggestions, folks?“
Our daughter is three. She loves her brother as if he were one of her precious Barbie dolls. Packs him around like a sack of flour. Lines up stuffies in his crib and makes up plays which make him giggle. Helps me change his cloth diapers, even the poopy ones.
And I think, she’s one hell of a trooper, too. Held her baby brother in a freezing car a month ago while I alerted the neighbours to call the fire trucks.
Sister leans over his crib and says, “Hi, little guy! “ Simply that.
And he cocks his head and listens.
Three simple words from a protective big sister makes all the difference.
He starts fighting. And wins his battle.
………….
Son’s life and health have been a challenge over the years; however, as difficult as circumstances might be, our mighty fighter perseveres.
Three days ago his big sister’s “little guy” turned thirty-six.
When I was a kid, a truck dropped off a huge box at our house that was addressed to my mother.
According to the paperwork, it was an automatic dishwasher, something that had just been invented, and we had no idea why we suddenly had one.
It took a few phone calls to figure out that, months earlier, my mother had entered a free sweepstakes at Zayres department store and the appliance was a prize.
She was scared to death of the newfangled device and never even hooked it up.
Yeah. It was funny as hell. I got a call from my counterpart at corporate. He has gotten laid off and he called me before they could escort him out to tell me we were getting laid off in three months. I confronted my boss and she turned ashen white but in the end she was honest with me.
Scott Ritter – “Palestine and Hamas have won.. Israel is in BIG TROUBLE!..”
In the United States, do not argue with the police. They are armed and they are jumpy because so many other people in the US are armed, including a lot of people who should not be.
Several years ago an Italian professor attending an academic conference in California crossed a street at a location other than a designated crosswalk. It would not occur to an Italian in a million years that this might be a crime. A cop saw him and shouted at him. He, being Italian, questioned the officer. The officer hurled him to the ground, tore his clothes, roughed him up and took him to jail for refusing to obey a lawful order given by a police officer. (He was eventually released without charge.)
The fact is, if the police are violating your civil rights, or even if they are breaking the law, there is nothing you can do about it at the time. Resisting them risks your being shot. Obey without question.
I was on a date with a veterinarian. She was a beautiful brunette with big eyes. She was a bit crazy too.
It was our second date and we were drinking a beer at a restaurant and somehow, we got to talking about how kids were growing up too fast, which is code for them sleeping around at too young of an age.
Just as I was drinking a sip of a beer, she said, “Yeah, I mean, I guess I get it. Kids are curious and going to experiment. When I was 6-years-old I stuck a pen in my p#ssy.”
I choked on my beer really hard and starting coughing. She immediately turned red, blushing with embarrassment for having been so candid and said, “Are you ok? Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
I was also red at this point from my brief oxygen shortage. I waved it off, still coughing, and said, “No worries at all! Kiiiids these days.”
MOBS SWARM US NUKE BASE, LEBANON/ ISRAEL ON BRINK, NUCLEAR SUB NEAR IRAN, IRAQ MOBILIZING
“President” Biden distributed 100 nuclear warheads all over the world. WTF?
I was a teenager. It was a temporary job. They had this big mail machine that folded letters, put them into envelopes and sealed them.
My job? It was sit stand between three of these machines and to squirt some water on the brushes every few minutes. The auto wetting water tank was broken and it was cheaper to hire me as a teenager (this was before UK minimum wage so it was about 30p an hour) until they could replace the water tank. You had to give it 3 sprays for it to be in the sweet spot anymore and the envelopes would be too wet, any less and too dry.
It drove me absolutely spare as the machines would beep each time a letter went through it. You had three machines beeping and you were stood there with a bucket of water and a couple squirty bottles. You’d hear the beeps in your sleep.
An actual wood burning fireplace. I got my first one in 1986, and every place has had one since. Unlike a wood stove, I can have a fire three seasons a year, without overheating my house.
When the first fluffy flakes of winter start falling, my wife and I start a fire. We might have a glass of wine, possibly a hot rum toddy, maybe mulled wine, brandy, or maybe peppermint schnapps and hot chocolate.
We sit in front of the fire, eating Brie and crackers, maybe some other snack. Possibly popcorn.
When it gets close to Christmas the Christmas music is playing. Two puppies at our feet.
Every Christmas when family comes over, we have the fire burning in the background, the tree is center of attention, but everyone loves hearing the pine snap crackle and popping in the fireplace.
The restructed events of the disaster have been pieced together over the years.
Mount Vesuvius was a known volcano in Roman times but it had not erupted in several centuries. No one knew why some mountains erupted and no one could predict when they would. However, due to the nature of fault lines in this region geologists now believe smaller earthquakes and eruptions simply relieves the pressure along the fault line that runs along Italy.
The Latins had no way of knowing that. All they know was volcanic soil grew good crops and volcanic ash was a key ingredient in Roman concrete. Italy was also the world’s factory at the time, so the area around Vesuvius centered around the city of Pompeii who was a big exporter of wine and metal tools. This was a pre-industrial society, so most people rarely went outside walking distance of their homes and for most residents this was their whole world.
In the days before the blast, many minor quakes were reported in the area around Vesuvius. No one knew what this meant, but Roman academics would later take this as the sign of potential eruption.
The exact moment of the blast was witnessed by the historian Pliny the Younger. He was reading Livy while his father governor Pliny the Elder was eating lunch. Indeed, the blast occurred during the lunch hour, as the most common find in Pompeii were tables set for lunch that were buried in ash and partially preserved. Pliny’s mother called them over to the window urgently and they looked and saw Mount Vesuvius’ summit turned into a tower of ash. Explosives didn’t exist in this period, and Pliny tried his best to explain how it appeared the force of the hot gas inside the mountain blown away the summit. The danger this caused was lost on no one, and Pliny the Elder gathered his soldiers to travel down across the Bay of Naples and rescue as many as he could while his family went away.
This was the worst kind of eruption. The lava is actually the least dangerous part of a volcano. Safe enough to be a tourist attraction at a distance and safe enough geologists is firefighting gear collect lava samples directly. The second most dangerous is the ash and rock because it tends to fall out of the sky and/or form hot avalanches Earth called pyroclastic flows. The hot gas is the most dangerous as it both suffocates and burns. Common gasses are CO2 and HS that are commonly disolved in solutions underground but bubbles up like a soda fountain inside the mountain. This causes volcanic explosions and pyroclastic flows.
The residents of Pompeii went outside and it was soon raining ash and rock as Vesuvius vented its contents into the sky. Evacuations started immediately, and anyone who wanted to stay was quickly convinced to leave with the first pyroclastic flows that nearly reached Pompeii. As Vesuvius lost pressure it stopped being able to support a column of ash and rock and this collapsed forming the flow. However, that simply restricted the throat of the volcano, allowing pressure to build up again in a cycle that only got worse as the day progressed. The first victims found in the bottom layer of ash in Pompeii were all killed by falling rock.
Travel was a big deal in a pre-industrial world as you would be gone for days and it was quite strenuous. Among items victims were carrying included bread, coins, and housekeys. The latter back in those days was a heavy iron thing that didn’t easily fit in a pocket. Most of the dead from Pompeii were persons unable to flee including a soldier with a bad toothache, a near term pregnant lady and her husband, and an old bedridden man and his teenaged grandson among others. Most of these people were not buried with their houses as the ash levels rose, but were killed lady by hot gas. Indeed, this is how we know the pyroclasic flows got worse through the afternoon, as the victims closer to the mountain are typically buried deeper in ash. The final pyroclastic flows killed the most people including Pliny the Elder who stayed behind after his men loaded up a boat of refugees in order to organize the evacuation.
This is also how we know there were a lot more victims than we find buried in ash because Pliny the Younger recounts how these bodies were all recovered and given proper funerals. Likewise, we know there are many more bodies that have not been found as much of what we know of is concentrated in the city itself when the majority of this region’s population was dispersed in the countryside. However, country folk were much more dispersed so finding said bodies is far more difficult and more is discovered every decade.
All that said, the bulk of the population managed to escape. The eruption only effected the immediate area of the blast and once out of sight of the mountain people survived and later returned to find a volcanic plain where the city had been. The layer of ash and pummice stone was roughly 20 feet deep and it simply wasn’t worth it to unbury the homes, many of which had collapsed under the weight. The whole city was effectively homeless and Emperor Titus personally arrived to survey the damage. Titus directed both state funds and his personal money to rebuilding Pompeii, and within two decades a planned city emerged. However, no one in Italy ever forgot how on one day that was otherwise like any other a mountain simply exploded for no reason and that most of the victims simply happen to be downwind of the disaster.
You likely seen those sculptures of Pompeii victims, but those are not bodies. The bodies rotted away leaving voids in the ash, and archeologists simply filled the voids with plaster to reveal the Pompean’s final moments, most clearly dying in agony.
Brian Berletic: War is COMING as China Rejects Dangerous US Maneuvers in Taiwan
“Let’s be frank about the Taiwan issue, where the US is involved. The US cares next to nothing about the well-being of Taiwanese people, who are Chinese in race and ethnicity. Why should they? Look at the way the US government treats Asians in their own country, many of whom are citizens. So what about other nationalities? Yea, that somes it all up in a nutshell.”
I’ma be honest, it’s fucking nerve racking. I had to give the period talk when I dont even know the period talk. I had to be the one to wake her up at 2am when she was 8 with police behind me to tell her that her mother overdosed and died. I get up everyday and makes sure she gets to school, leave work, pick her up and take her to excuricculer/home/friends/wherever the fuck, then go back to work and finish my 12 hour shift. Pick her up if not at home. Cook/order/figure out dinner, spend some time with her try to get to laugh at least once a day, make sure she gets her shower in, hug her tight kiss her forehead tell her I love her and goodnight, then go lay down and try to sleep myself …to wake up and do it all again.
Wanna know what I can’t do? Break down and cry. Blame her mom. Blame my mom. Blame the world for putting me and her though what we been through. And some days, that is all I wanna do. But when I feel tears in my eyes I’ll walk back to her room and look at her sleeping, usually her back to me.
I remember then why I keep getting up every morning
I’m in my 70s and retired now, but years ago, worked as the President’s assistant for an accounting firm.
Many times over the 4 years that I worked there, he would say, “I need this done by Monday.”
I would jump right on it and work all weekend if necessary. The reason being, he and the other owners of the small company treated me like gold.
I was a single Mom. When I first started working there, I was separated from my alcoholic husband, heading to divorce. I had no money to pay the mortgage or car insurance. I confided in one of the owners and the next thing I knew, they handed me a check to cover everything past due. They deducted a small amount each week from my paycheck to pay them back.
There was no problem if I had to stay at home with a sick child. If my work for the day was done, they had no problem if I hit the road early to avoid rush-hour traffic. My hours were flexible because they knew if they needed me to work late or on the weekend, I would cheerfully do it. They gave me great raises. They valued me as an employee and I never took advantage of it.
Not all small business owners are horrible people. I was lucky to work for such a great team. The only reason I left was to remarry and move out of state. I heard later they sold the company.
World at end of 200 yrs of North Atlantic rule: Sachs
I’ve worked with Chinese tech companies. Their engineers and scientists are devoted to their families, employers and country.
China has the capacity to leap frog the US in many different technologies. Take your pick, they are on it.
The Chinese government places a high value on a highly educated population. Engineering and scientific professionals are leading a revolution in advancing scientific innovation in China.
Their current leader, Xi, was a chemical engineer before becoming involved in his political career. In fact, many Chinese politicians are former engineers, refreshing thought isn’t it?
The motivations for innovation in the US and China are a key point in China leap frogging the US. Both countries reward success in innovation with financial incentives.
But, the Chinese have a greater sense of pride in their country and it’s future.
The US is presently extremely divided politically, current leadership is seeking short term monetary goals over the advancement of scientific innovation.
China may take the lead in further technological and scientific breakthroughs in this environment.
I had this scenario happen to me. A group of us were on a whitewater rafting trip and we went to dinner. All of us got the buffet, which was huge and had everything you could imagine (including prime rib). One of the couples both ordered the prime rib dinner off the menu, with appetizers, desserts and extra sides. When the waiter came to check on us and see how we were doing and if we were ready to pay, I spoke up and said “separate checks for all of us, please”. The waiter winked at me, other couples smiled, the couple that ordered the dinner had a fit. “We agreed we would split ALL costs! We can’t afford this unless we do”. I just smiled and said “we agreed that we would split costs, that was before we realized we would be taken advantage of. It’s separate checks for us from now on”. The other couples instantly said “agreed!” and “I didn’t agree to split the cost of a $125 dinner for you two when ours was $30!” I got the death glare, and neither of them spoke a word to me after that. When we got home I noticed I was blocked on everything. Oh well. They weren’t friends of mine and I found them to be not team players-not someone I would choose to be friends with.
I have a relative that I thought was a wonderful person and mother. Her spouse died suddenly when their daughter was 13 or 14 (they live in a different state than I do).
About a year after her spouse died, I start getting phone calls from her daughter in the evenings. I discovered her mom would go to her boyfriend’s house and cook he and his daughters dinner, while her daughter ate cereal for dinner at home.
Over the next several years, I spent a lot of time talking the teen through issues, concerns and challenges that mom wasn’t around to address.
Mom didn’t even know her daughter was taking college courses in her senior year of high school because she wasn’t there when she attended the classes in the evenings.
When it was time for the teen to go to college, she got into a great school. Mom told her she couldn’t go to it because they didn’t have the money. When the daughter went off to the lesser expensive and prestigious college, mom married the boyfriend, bought a larger home with a pool in the backyard, bought a facelift, and a luxury car. The daughter had only 2 pairs of jean to wear at college.
At the end of the daughter’s freshman year, she calls mom to let her know when she’ll be home. Mom tells her it would be better for her to stay at college over summer break.
Her daughter explains that she lives in a sorority house and it closes in the summer. Mom didn’t care, she told her to find somewhere to live… during final exam week.
The daughter calls me crying and I take her for the summer to live with me. I got her a job at the company I worked at and we made the best of it.
The insensitive and cruel things my relative has done to her daughter over the years is more than I can list.
By the way, the daughter went on to get a doctorate, despite her narcissist mother who I have zero respect or affection for.
Humans started using their own feces as compost pretty much as soon as agriculture was invented. The practice continued in many places well into the 20th century.
However, the practice soon proved to have a lot of drawbacks. Humans in the early agricultural era didn’t know about bacteria, and crops fertilized with human dung often caused outbreaks of disease because those gut bacteria persisted in the soil until they found a new human host.
As such, people learned that although it was fine to plant cereal crops, or any plant with a long stalk in such fields, and not to plant carrots or other root crops for at least a year. By that time pathogenic bacteria had usually died out.
Because horses, pigs and cows don’t share a lot of gut flora with humans, it was soon found using animal dung had the same effect with fewer drawbacks. It was perfectly safe to use a few acres of land as cattle pasture for a year, then plant the following year.
I’ll tell you something about Jim who doesn’t want to come to the company parties. He thinks if he does a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, that is all he owes you. He doesn’t think having a job means the company owns him, body and soul. Even if he knows that not attending the parties means a black mark against him, he still won’t go.
I’ll tell you something else. Before I retired, I worked for a lot of different organisations, some large, some small, and there were always some Jims. They got along well with their co-workers. They did their jobs and did them to the best of their ability. They were often prepared to go above and beyond the call of duty at work. But that was where it stopped.
Here’s the thing though. In every organisation, for every Jim, there are at least 25% of your staff who are Jim wannabes. They all wish they had the nerve to say no, but they don’t want to risk their jobs or their pay raises or their promotions, or even just the disapproval of their co-workers. They won’t tell you this because, as we can see by your question, in your mind this is not somebody exercising their right to say no to a social event. It is a problem that needs to be “handled”.
They don’t go home from the company party and say, “Wow, what a blast.” They walk in the door limp with exhaustion and say, “Thank god that’s over!” They probably put on a convincing act while they were there, but they didn’t want to spend their private time with a bunch of people they are already spending at least eight hours a day with. If they want to party, they want to do it with family and personal friends.
If you want to “team build” either with parties or other activities, do it within regular working hours. Jim probably still won’t like it very much, but at least he is getting paid for it. And it will not be breaking into the precious free time he needs to recharge his batteries so he can be an effective employee for you.
You’re going to need a bank of fryers and I wouldn’t fry them from raw. Frying them from raw will break the oil down really quickly and force you to either shut down the operation to change the oil or serve crappy wings. You don’t want to do either of those.
So, get your wings and brine them overnight in a simple solution of water, salt and sugar. Then drain them and bake them until they are cooked through. Cool the wings and package them in batches that will fill a fryer basket. Say 2.5 pounds per plastic bag and refrigerate them until it’s time to cook them.
On site, set up your fryers, your cold boxes of wings, a station for hot holding and saucing and a table for serving them to the customer. The cooks fry the wings, dump them into the hot holding units from one side and the service workers pull an order from the bin, place it into a bowl, toss the wings in sauce and then serve them to the customers. You can use heat lamps overtop of the wings to keep them hot, which you can rent, along with deep fat fryers that run on propane.
I worked a few summers at a home for children who’d experienced abuse and neglect. Their caseworker had just dropped them off; two beautiful little girls with big, blue eyes that swallowed their faces. They were two and four years old and they were very quiet for children their age. I looked them over, and immediately noticed several things: they had rope burns around their ankles, matted hair, and both were underweight and wheezing like they had the croup.
On closer examination I noted that the older of the two had bitten the insides of her mouth so hard that not only were they bleeding, but infected. I could not hold back my tears. They came with barely any clothing or personal effects, but many children in foster care share that experience. And later that evening when they were settled and I read over their file I knew they had lived a nightmare.
There had been an older sister, but she had died, thus prompting a welfare investigation in the first place. They found a woman addicted to drugs with a boyfriend who cooked meth—and they tied their children up in ropes to keep them out of their way. That was eighteen years ago and memories of those two girls still make me teary eyed. Questions like this immediately bring them to the forefront of my mind. I hope they finally found peace.
I had gotten out of the Army in 1971 (was drafted) and working my old job in a drugstore. I was growing a beard and letting my hair grow. A older customer came in and started criticizing my hair and beard (this was in the deep south). He said I was a disgrace. I let him know I didn’t need his permission or approval . He went to my boss and said the same thing. My boss basically said “He spent 2 years defending this country, he can wear his hair any way he wants.” . The customer left and my boss winked at me.
A 42 year old lady came in with severe abdominal pain and nausea. She wasn’t vomiting. No other symptoms or problems, except for multiple prior visits to the ER with the same problem.
Many doctors had tried and failed to diagnose and treat her. She had been to all the specialists at all the regional Universities. The famed Cleveland Clinic even took a crack at her.
All the tests were negative including blood work, poop samples, X-rays, scopes in both ends, the camera pill (a camera that the patient swallows, it takes pictures as it traverses the gut), and various scans.
She had CT scans, MRIs and various nuclear scans. There were scans with and without IV contrast and oral contrast. There were scans of her arteries, and scans of her gallbladder. Her gallbladder was a little weak, so a weak surgeon jerked it out without any benefit.
She had every blood test for cancer known to man. Multiple biopsies were always negative. I thank God that no tired pathologist ever imagined any cancer cells under the microscope. This lady already suffered so much at the hands of her healers.
X-rays were done many times with and without Barium. Some of the X-rays were done as videos. She might have had enough radiation to kill any tumor!
And the scopes! Multiple scopes down the throat and into the stomach and duodenum. Another scope down the throat through which a catheter is passed into the bile duct and pancreas to inject contrast that highlights the ducts for more X-rays. A urologist even scoped her bladder!
She saw stomach specialists, liver specialists, gastrointestinal surgeons, kidney specialists, urologists, neurologists, and even psychiatrists.
There’s an old saying in Medicine, if the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. This poor lady had been beaten with every specialist’s hammer in 3 states!
When they couldn’t diagnose her, they just skipped straight to the cure. She failed multiple curative procedures and dozens of medications. There were medications to neutralize acid, coat the stomach, decrease acid production, anti-spasmodics, anxiolytics, antidepressants, antibiotics, anti seizure, antifunguals, and plain old pain medications.
She learned to refuse the pain medications, because she was smart enough to realize that she would be written off as an addict, that doctors stop trying if they think you just want opioids.
She has been put on every dietary restriction, and treated with every fiber supplement. She knew it all because she had tried it all!
The first night I saw her, I just told her that she had already seen many doctors much smarter than myself, working in a low level ER. But I did what I always do in these difficult cases.
I sit down and shut up and listen. I talk about weather, sports, hobbies and family; anything but medicine. But mostly I listen and observe. I try to get the patient talking more than myself. It’s an attempt to make a brain-to-brain connection for a two-way flow of truth. It is engaging the patient’s mind as the powerful problem-solving machine that it is.
Two minds together are more than 1+1=2. It’s more like 1+1=4. And it doesn’t really matter much that the other mind has limited medical knowledge. In fact, this process can sometimes work better if at least one of the minds is unspoiled by medical dogma.
So there we were, in the middle of a hectic ER night with several people trying to die. I talked with her for a few minutes until a nurse convinced me that another patient was closer to the next world than this one.
I grabbed the patient’s hand and begged her to be patient. I promised her that if she would wait for me, that I would give her my best shot. She was obviously in pain, but she attempted a smile and closed her eyes as I left to find something easier to do, like make a room look like an axe murderer walked in on a meeting of hemophiliacs anonymous, by saving a trauma victim.
That night was one of those nights that leaves me feeling a bit PTSD. I just wanted to crawl into my hut for a couple days. Yes, I have an actual stick-and-grass hut in the woods for this purpose.
But I have a soft spot for kids. The nurses all say that kids like me, and I am a pediatrician. I hate to leave a kid at the end of my shift, knowing that the next doctor may not feel as comfortable with kids.
I picked up the last chart in the rack (this was years ago), and saw that it was a 3 year old girl with abdominal pain. She was on the other side of the curtain from my 42 year old patient whom I had completely forgotten, or I would have spent the end of my shift with her as promised.
I took a deep breath and switched my brain from high pressure ER doc mode to easy and relaxed pediatrician mode. I walked into the room and quickly recognized a familiar problem. I explained to the worried mother that it was a simple stomach virus, that young children can’t tell the difference between pain and nausea. I explained that I was going to treat her pain with a tablet called “Zofran” for nausea, that dissolves in the mouth. I told her that I would be back in a few minutes and I left to give my order to a nurse.
By this time it was well after the end of my shift. The nurse I found said, “There you are! We thought you left! Did you forget about the 42 year old woman with abdominal pain? She’s been lying in there for hours!”
Of course I had totally forgotten her, but I remembered fast and said, “No! Of course not! I promised to spend some time with her if she would wait until the end of my shift!”
At that the nurse winked and nodded her head knowingly. I said, “No! Not like that! Look, can you give this little girl 2 mg of Zofran?” And I turned back to see my forgotten patient.
She was still in obvious discomfort but was waiting patiently. I walked over and placed my hand on her shoulder. Before I could say a word, she said, “That was great!” I didn’t know what she meant until she said, “You’re so good with kids, you should have been a pediatrician.”
She did not seem surprised when I said, “Well, as a matter of fact, I am!”
She joked, “No wonder I’m no better, my doctor is a pediatrician!”
I laughed. She tried to laugh. I poked my head around the curtain and asked the mother if it was okay to open the curtain? This violates protocols and is probably illegal, but I was too tired to care. I was simply trying to create an atmosphere to promote dialogue. A pleasant mother-baby dyad seemed the perfect antidote to the chaotic night this lady witnessed.
So now we had three minds working together. We talked to the little girl. She was smiling and feeling better already and asking for food. We talked about little girl things like toys, birthdays and sisters.
The mother thanked me. The Zofran trick worked wonderfully, despite her doubts. Then she looked at my patient and said, “He’s a wonderful doctor; listen to whatever he says.”
I asked her for permission to share her case and then I explained to the mother with a smile how that she had no idea, that this poor lady has some incurable ailment that has stumped all the specialists at all the Universities.
And then my patient and the mother began to talk about her case. As soon as the mother realized that it was a case of chronic abdominal pain and nausea, she drew an analogy to her daughter’s simple acute stomach virus.
I shook my head at the absurdity of it and was about to interrupt this conversation that was quickly getting off track. And then I remembered my rule for difficult cases (shut up and listen!).
My patient said, “Believe me, I have tried every stomach medication and even some herbs. Zofran does nothing for me.”
But my mind was zipping through all my experiences with chronic pediatric abdominal pain. I thought of the episodic nature of my patient’s condition. I asked her weird questions l usually reserve for pediatric cases like, “What part of the world did your ancestors come from? Any children in your family with health problems? How old is your house? Do either of your parents get migraines?”
She said, “Nobody has ever asked that question. My mother and father have both had migraine headaches their whole life. My brother gets them, too!”
And then I knew the diagnosis, even though I had assumed it was impossible and had never heard of an adult case. There is a condition called “abdominal migraine” that affects young children. There is usually at least one parent with migraine headaches, but most of these kids will get better by age 12. Their abdominal pain just stops. A certain portion will develop migraine headaches about the same time their abdominal pain goes away.
But I had my doubts. Pediatric abdominal migraine is easy to treat with simple medications that had failed to help this lady. But what if I gave her a common adult migraine treatment such as a vasoconstrictor? The pain of migraine is caused by too much blood flow to the head. Medicines that constrict blood vessels can be curative.
These medications work best if given very early in an episode. My patient was hours into this episode. As expected, the first dose in the ER that night did not relieve her pain, but it did do something much better: it gave her hope.
I gave her a prescription and sent her home, still in pain. But she was so grateful and she thanked me profusely. I felt a little anxious that maybe I was giving her false hope, for surely it could not be this simple? Surely the specialists thought of this?
Several months later she was in the ER with a sick family member. She was beaming and radiant. When she saw me she said, “That’s him! He’s the one who cured me!”
Tears were rolling down both our faces that night.
COVID-19. I have had several conversations here in the US with people who teach. They have all pointed to how awful the current batch of kids are when it comes to classroom learning. They can’t sit still nor pay attention because they lacked the classroom environment at that formative age to reinforce those skills; learning is nearly impossible. Meanwhile China adapted quickly to initial lockdowns, and by April 2020 normality had returned. My niece serves as my personal data point for what happened, and she has had no significant interruption in her education as online instruction was brief.
The haphazard lockdown strategy of the US combined with a retreat to virtual teaching will have a major effect on the labor force come 10 years from now. China’s strategy of strong, nationwide lockdown at onset followed by an elimination strategy allowed the country to more or less weather the storm more gracefully. One can have criticisms about how the country left COVID, but the end result is that the period of normality from spring 2020 through fall 2022 was the right target to reach, and the impact will play out in the coming years.
The current seemingly higher economic growth rate of the US is unsustainable and superficial because the inflation rate in the United States is much higher than that in China.
Since the 1980s, although the US has pioneered technological revolutions such as information technology, the Internet, and life sciences, and revolutionary technologies have brought new markets, services, products, and high-tech companies, it stands to reason that total factor productivity growth should be very high, but the new rounds of technological change have not prevented the gradual decline of U.S. productivity.
Statistics show that the average annual growth rate of total factor productivity in the United States has dropped to about 1% in the past 40 years, and even less than 0.7% in the past 10 years. The third industrial revolution did not bring about a substantial increase in total factor productivity growth in the US like the second industrial revolution that occurred during the industrialization process. Economists call this phenomenon the productivity growth paradox.
Forecasting a country’s potential growth rate is very important for judging its economic direction, but it is not easy. In 2022, China’s GDP may be 72% of that of the United States. Assuming that the U.S. economic growth rate would be 2.2%, China’s economic growth rate would be 5%, and the U.S. dollar and RMB remain at the current real exchange rate, based on this calculation, China would catch up with the United States in 2029. However, potential growth is not actual growth. A country’s ability to achieve its potential growth rate depends on whether sufficient demand exists. In the past three years, China had mainly relied on investment and exports to create demand. Thus, China must increase domestic consumption to create sufficient demand.
An important reason for China’s economic success lies in the close integration of a competent government and an efficient market. The invisible hand of the market and the visible hand of the government play a positive role in promoting economic and social development. The Chinese government focuses on key industries that promote national economic growth through five-year plans, industrial policies, and allocation of financial resources. Technological changes that occur in node industries are transmitted and amplified through the production network, forming a spillover effect, driving the emergence of a large number of upstream and downstream market entities, and producing a multiplier effect on the overall economy.
The closer an industry is to a node (the area with the highest density in the production network), the greater its impact on the economy. Empirical research also shows that investment projects with longer industrial chains generally bring more jobs, tax revenue and growth to the local economy.
Total factor productivity growth is a decisive factor in a country’s economic performance. Since the Industrial Revolution, no country or economy has been able to maintain a total factor productivity growth rate of more than 2.5% for a long time after completing the industrialization process. Since for advanced economies, sustained high productivity growth is the exception rather than the norm because when the share of the service industry increases significantly, it becomes more difficult to maintain rapid growth in total factor productivity.
The real estate industry is a long-chain industry and is of great significance to boosting domestic consumption. Putting all factors together, the consumer market can be expected to recover in 2023. Before the epidemic, consumption growth was above 7%. If China wants to achieve a potential growth of 5.5%, consumption growth of 5.4% will be enough. It is now no longer appropriate to call the Chinese economy an investment-driven economy.
In many areas, China has reached the global frontier in mid-level technologies, and hidden champions have emerged in almost every industry. For example, China was originally a latecomer to the electric vehicle industry, but it has become a leader within 10 years. Relying on development and innovation, China is becoming the largest contributor to the global clean economy.
The Chinese government has successfully prevented and resolved major financial risks through active and prudent deleveraging efforts. Money only generates value when it is used in the real economy. Serving the real economy has become a priority for financial institutions. The negative impacts of aging in China are actually overstated, at least for the next 10 years because over the next 30 years, artificial intelligence and automation will replace more workers than will be lost due to aging.
China has a large state-owned industry with a net capital stock of 60 trillion yuan. The central government has begun transferring state-owned shares to social security funds. These shares will generate enough dividends to support the social security system for the aging population.
In the long run, the economic growth rate of China will be higher and better than that of the US.
When our son was around 3,(he’s now 48) I took a parenting class where it was recommended that you give your child a choice of 2 things that were both acceptable to you, so the child felt that he or she had some control over their actions. One night we had company for dinner. One of our guests was a psychologist who frequently lectured both in the US and abroad.
When it was bedtime, my son said he didn’t want to go to bed, so I gave him a choice. “Do you want to go to bed in your own bed or mommy and daddy’s?” He answered by saying “I want a Coca Cola”. I repeated the bed options, his bed or ours. He repeated his desire for a Coke. We went back and forth like that a few times, then he put his hands on his hips and said “I want a Coca Cola! Will you pour it or shall I?” He was using my parenting method on me!
Our psychologist friend fell off his chair laughing. I scooped up my son and put him in his bed. Our friend told us years later that he told that story in all his lectures from that time on, until he retired.
Back in the day, when physical mail was still delivered to companies, I executed my quiet sabotage. The CEO was a weird one. He would open all the mail, read it, write his comments directly on each piece of mail and then distribute it to the appropriate person. Mind you we had roughly 50 office staff and 100 factory employees, so we weren’t a tiny operation.
The CEO instituted 2 cost savings. We were not allowed to purchase staples or paper clips. We were all given some little device (as a replacement stapler) that folded corners of papers and then perforated that corner so that the papers couldn’t separate.
And his feeling was that enough paper clips that came with the mail so we should just reuse them. It was ridiculous and impractical.
I khew that I was going to be fired at the end of the week in the afternoon and decided to annoy him. I went to Staples and bought all the office employees 2 boxes of staples and 2 boxes of paper clips. Sure enough Friday afternoon, I’m let go and then the CEO left right immediately. The wuss didn’t want to see how much of impact my dismissal would be on morale.
I was given the opportunity to say goodbye to everyone. So I walked desk to desk and gave each person staples & paper clips. I heard, the next week, that the CEO went bonkers seeing everyone having them. Lmao
The Duran: Neocons DESTROY Themselves as Russia and China Forge New World Order
The Duran discusses the failures of the neocons to maintain the US-led unipolar order amid Russia and China’s global rise.
Huawei and Xiaomi are both Chinese technology companies. This is true.
But essentially, Huawei and Xiaomi are Chinese technology companies with completely different natures, so their treatment is also completely different.
To accurately distinguish the differences between the two companies, we must start with the history of world globalization and the changing role of Chinese companies.
Before the 1980s, China was one of the poorest and backward countries in the world, almost isolated from the modern economy.
When China opened its doors in the 1980s, the Western world discovered that this was such a special country.
It has a huge poor population, but most of them have basic education.
It has a sound industrial foundation, but its technology is very backward.
He has huge territory and rich resources.
It has relatively complete infrastructure, including roads, railways and electricity.
At this time, the West had just carried out the first round of globalized industrial transfer, moving low-profit, polluting and risky manufacturing industries to Asian countries such as South Korea, Indonesia, and Thailand.
However, these countries have limited population and scale, and limited capacity. As industries increase, salary levels increase rapidly and become less cheap.
Moreover, the education level of the population in these countries is limited, the infrastructure is limited, and there are many restrictions.
At this time, China was like an endless pasture. No matter how many cows the cowboys threw in, it could quickly accommodate them.
As a result, China quickly became the new continent for Western manufacturing.
Throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the 20th century, China was like a magnet attracting manufacturing industries from around the world, and countless companies developed in China.
They all follow the model of Western hope:
Version 1.0 Chinese Company: Processing and Manufacturing
1. Design, technology and standards provided by Western companies
2. Western companies provide key components
3. Chinese companies are responsible for cheap raw materials, cheap labor, and completion of assembly and production.
4. Western companies are responsible for sales
In this stage, Chinese companies shouldered the heaviest and hardest work, but could only obtain 10% of the profits, while Western companies took away 90% of the profits.
The Nike sneakers we wear, the French bags in women’s hands, and the various toys children play with are all products of this model.
The Chinese produce these things, but they cannot afford to consume them.
Of course, although the profits of the Chinese are meager, the total amount is huge. Therefore, during this period, they achieved a large amount of wealth accumulation, and gradually accumulated knowledge and talents.
Some companies are beginning to try to enter a new stage.
Version 2.0 Chinese company: independent production
1. Chinese companies purchase designs, technologies and standards through joint ventures or introductions
2. Western companies provide key components
3. Chinese companies are responsible for cheap raw materials, cheap labor, and completion of assembly and production.
4. Chinese companies are responsible for local sales
During this stage, the share of Chinese companies expanded. They got rid of the pure processing industry and began to focus on technology, trying to build their own brands and market capabilities.
However, during this period, the product quality of Chinese companies could not be compared with that of their foreign counterparts, and they mainly relied on low prices to compete in the local Chinese market.
Haier Electric, Chery Automobile, Lenovo Computer, etc. are all Chinese companies that have risen during this period.
Their degree of autonomy has been greatly improved, but most of their profits are still taken away by Western companies through patent licensing and the import of key parts, and they can only compete in the Chinese market. There is no pressure on foreign counterparts.
Version 3.0 of Chinese companies: independent production, global competition
1. Chinese companies solve most technical and quality problems through independent research and development
2. Western companies provide key components
3. Chinese companies are responsible for cheap raw materials, cheap labor, and completion of assembly and production.
4. Chinese companies are responsible for global sales
Around 2010, Chinese companies grew further. They have more technologies and knowledge systems, and the quality of their products has also improved rapidly. began to threaten Western counterparts in the global market. Especially in the fields of household appliances, kitchen appliances, electronic products, mobile phones and other fields, it has achieved rapid success.
Xiaomi, VIVO, Oppo, Transsion, Haier, Lenovo and other companies are representatives of this stage.
They have mastered the complete design, manufacturing and quality management capabilities of products, and established a good brand and reputation. During this period, products made in China began to be famous around the world and can be seen everywhere around us. Their low prices and high quality put traditional Western and Japanese brands to shame.
But they still have an Swelling of Achilles: key components and technologies are in the hands of their Western counterparts. For example, the Qualcomm chip and Android system of Xiaomi mobile phones; such as the Intel processor and Windows system in Lenovo computers;
Through control of these key technologies and components, the West still takes away most of the profits of these companies.
Take Xiaomi mobile phone as an example. Its core processor comes from the United States, its memory comes from South Korea, its screen comes from South Korea and Japan, its camera comes from Japan, its key communication chips and sensors come from Europe and the United States, and even the tempered glass on the screen surface is a product of an American company. . Chinese companies can only supply low-value accessories such as casings, speakers, and interfaces. According to media statistics, 70% of the value of Xiaomi mobile phones comes from Western suppliers.
Therefore, although Xiaomi has squeezed out the share of traditional peers such as Nokia, Ericsson, and Sony, for every mobile phone it sells, Western companies make the most profit, and the Chinese still take away a small part.
Version 4.0 Chinese companies: disruptors
1. Chinese companies master core technologies and solve all problems
2. Chinese companies provide key parts themselves
3. Chinese companies are responsible for cheap raw materials, cheap labor, and completion of assembly and production.
4. Chinese companies are responsible for global sales
After entering 2015, some Chinese companies have grown further. They began to get involved in core semiconductors, operating systems, precision sensors, databases and artificial intelligence algorithms. It began to seize the most profitable industrialization in the world and the last economic position of Western developed countries.
Huawei, DJI, Hikvision and other companies are representatives of this stage
They have all the features of a 3.0 enterprise and are beginning to replace Western suppliers. Not only do they make excellent products, but they also use core components and basic software developed entirely by themselves. They intend to completely take away the fattest piece of meat in the mouths of Western companies.
Before Huawei was sanctioned by the United States, it had surpassed Samsung and Apple to become the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer. It is completely different from Xiaomi. Almost all the core components of Huawei’s mobile phones are provided by Chinese companies, and they have even begun to develop basic operating systems in order to kick Google out. In the field of communications, it holds the most 5G patents in the world and develops all high-value semiconductors and antennas on its own.
The essence of the above 3 versions of Chinese enterprises, 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0, is the same.
In the chain of globalization, Western companies take the best parts of food, and Chinese companies get the remaining food scraps. The difference between 1.0 and 3.0 is just the amount of residue obtained.
Therefore, whether it is Lenovo or Xiaomi, although they are technology companies from China, their positioning is within the scope of this rule and is allowed by the West.
But 4.0 Chinese companies are different. They are trying to subvert the rules of the game that have existed for decades.
They still embrace globalization, but they think, why are companies from Western developed countries always at the top of the food chain?
This involves the issue of economic competition between developed and developing countries.
Why do Westerners enjoy the most vacations, the best benefits, and the highest salaries and rewards? And people in developing countries work hard and overtime, but can only get meager pay and struggle to feed their families? Are people in developed countries inherently smarter and harder-working? The Chinese believe that this is not the case and that something is wrong with the rules.
Chinese companies like Huawei are determined to subvert this rule.
In the end, their appearance caused tension in Western countries: the subversives have occupied the entire country, their athletes have come to the king’s castle, and Huawei is the champion at the forefront.
Kings and nobles discovered that they could no longer defeat the subversives through “civilized rules.” How can he maintain a comfortable life in his castle and continue to rule and plunder the entire world in the future? The behavior of subversives must not be allowed!
So they shouted: They are thieves, liars, and traitors, don’t believe them!
While silently picking up the gun in his hand, he aimed at the one running at the front.
Creole Artichoke Bisque
Ingredients
16 ounces butter
8 tablespoons all-purpose flour
6 cup beef stock
2 ribs celery, finely chopped
3 large onions, finely chopped
1 bunch green onions, finely chopped
2 bay leaves
1/4 teaspoon thyme
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 (14 ounce) cans artichoke hearts, undrained
Salt and black pepper to taste
1/4 teaspoon Tabasco sauce
1 cup dry white wine
4 ounces light cream
2 tablespoons parsley, minced
Instructions
Melt the butter in a heavy pot and add the flour. Over low heat, cook for 5 minutes, stirring constantly.
Slowly add the stock and when well mixed, add the celery, onions, green onions, bay leaves, thyme and garlic. Let this simmer for 45 minutes.
Chop the artichoke hearts fairly fine and then add to the pot, along with the artichoke water. Cook at a low simmer for another 30 minutes.
Add salt and pepper to taste, the Tabasco, wine and cream and bring to a simmer. Do NOT boil.
The bisque is now ready to serve.
Sprinkle a bit of parsley over the bisque in each bowl.
Tell the truth,but , it wont make any difference, no one will believe you.
I was having drinks after work with my coworkers, and the waitress got off work and joined us. She had been our waitress for over a year and we had no spark in that time. Though she was attractive. When I said I was going home, she asked if I could give her a ride. I dropped her off, and didn’t think anymore about it.
The next day I swapped vehicles with my girlfriend, as she needed a truck to help her sister move something.
She found a brown paper lunch bag in the back seat. It had a lacey bra, panties and unused condoms in it. I was totally at a loss. Then I remembered giving the waitress a ride home. So on Monday I handed the bag to her, and asked if it was hers, and it was. She gave no explanation of how it got in my backseat, or even why she was carrying it.
I asked her to explain to my girlfriend, and she declined, saying she didnt want a whole bunch of drama over nothing. So I got a whole bunch of drama from my girlfriend.
I couldn’t even blame her, or come up with a plausible story. We broke up shortly after that
NOT POSSIBLE: Why US Can’t Compete with CHINESE Monster Drones?
“China also has many AI drones such as the amphibious Nezha that can fly and dive to 23ft under water; shark/dolphin/stingray undersea drones; and an anti-air/land defense system called the Hornet’s Nest that can launch 10,000 explosive drones rapidly each will auto lockon enemy vehicles. People have no idea how secure China’s borders really are today.”
Well, this is the first post for my new series: “Correcting Society Ills“.
This new series, as I have mentioned previously, is concerned with RECONSTRUCTION of the West.
As I have already mentioned, the threat of Global War has passed the DANGER ZONE. That was in 2020 through 2022. What we are experiencing now is a “lesser” state of war. Oh, sure, nuclear weapon threats are being bantered about, and provocations are seemingly everywhere at a global level, but the unseen global counter-threats are not being made public and they will quench any aggressive moves against the great Asian powers.
So, global change resembles this dynamic…
Change; old to new.
Threat of war… either occurs or fizzles out with a *pop*.
I claim that it fizzled out.
What is left is a ruined Western society.
And a need for RECONSTRUCTION.
So we are going to discuss that reconstruction and what needs to occur.
Mind you, actual war can still occur, it’s just that it becomes less and less probable as time progresses forward.
In our reconstruction discussions and talks we will cover all sorts of issues and maladies that the West are suffering through. From fat-generating use of polyunsaturated oils in Western foods, to the destruction of family culture, and the strange ideas of modern Western youth.
You will find all sorts of videos and discussions on related topics herein. It’s part of a phase in our society, and the world must go through this to get to the other side; one of an overall better quality of life.
I can’t answer for near overseas Chinese (that is Chinese in Asia). I can write about my UK experiences.
It was Christianity and FG being a very distant second.
Christianity preyed on recent immigrant types and how they were often alone and isolated having migrated. I had numerous xian types try convert me constantly mistaking me for a migrant.
Same shit when my mother got cancer, some how the jesus types found out and went to find her to try convert her.
I told them to fuck off.
Mother told them to fuck off.
$240 Billion Lithography Machine Order Canceled,China Achieves Full Technological Autonomy!
SMIC, a prominent chip manufacturing company, operates in various areas such as chip design, manufacturing, packaging, and sales. The quality and efficiency of chip production heavily rely on the technological level and precision of the lithography machines, a crucial equipment in chip manufacturing.
However, due to escalating global trade tensions and US export control policies on Chinese high-tech companies like SMIC, the company has been unable to purchase advanced lithography machines and other equipment from the United States. This has prompted SMIC to cancel a $24 billion lithography machine order with the US company ASML, attracting significant attention and raising concerns about alternative markets for chip sales.
The cancellation of the lithography machine order by SMIC is influenced by both the global trade environment and domestic policies. As one of the largest chip manufacturers globally, SMIC’s decision has implications for the global chip industry. The uncertain global trade environment has disrupted the chip supply chain, while the Chinese government’s support for the chip industry has limited its domestic development.
The event’s impact on the global chip industry is two-fold. On one hand, competition in the global chip market will intensify, requiring major chip companies to enhance their technological capabilities and supply chain management. On the other hand, SMIC’s actions may inspire imitation by other countries, further intensifying global chip market competition.
Analyzing the impact of this event reveals that SMIC’s cancellation affects not only the global chip industry but also the US technology sector. Intel, one of the major US tech giants, has highlighted the significant impact on the global chip supply chain, prompting questions about the effectiveness of the Biden administration’s policies for the US industry.
Addressing this challenge requires several approaches. Firstly, China should strengthen international cooperation to collectively navigate the uncertainties in the global trade environment. Secondly, domestic policies should be enhanced to support and promote the development of the chip industry within China. Lastly, SMIC should focus on capacity building, continuously improving technological capabilities, and enhancing supply chain management.
China doesn’t use forced labour to make shoes and apparel. It is another political bit of nonsense that the US government made up.
The US government even claimed that China uses forced labour to pluck cotton, just like how the USA enslaved black people to pick cotton in the past. Goodness gracious, what nonsense, who even uses human beings to pluck cotton nowadays. That’s the old primitive way of the USA. Most of the cotton in China is machine-picked and high-speed packed.
So, This is Happening in West Maui, It’s changes EVERYTHING for Oprah & the Rock
The way these people have been treated is beyond disgusting. Greene lies through his teeth. Banks should freeze their mortgages for at least a minimum of three years to allow the people to get back on their feet.
Funny story. In 1986, I went through basic at Fort Cambell, Kentucky. I had a two-year degree, and so I entered as an E3. A couple of weeks into the training, the 1stSgt called me into his office. He’s reviewing my record and commenting that he thinks my records are wrong. Because of my two-year degree, he thinks I should have entered as an E4.
He looks at me and asks, “When you enlisted, did they promise you E4?” I quickly answered, “Yes, 1stSgt.” He quickly responds, “I knew it! I will have you promoted to E4, but it will take a week or two. I said, “Thank you 1stSGT!” and was dismissed.
A couple of weeks later, the C.O. of the training company stopped me on the way back from evening chow and said, “I wanted you to know that your next LES will reflect that you were promoted to E4. I cannot have you pinned while you are in basic, nor can you wear the rank because you would be the same rank as some of the soldiers assigned to the company, but, you have been promoted to E4.” I said, “thank you sir,” saluted and went on my way.
As soon as I graduated, I upgraded all my rank insignia to SP4. I get to Aberdeen Proving Grounds for schooling, and as I check-in, the soldier behind the counter asks, “Are you promotable?” I did not know what that meant, but I said, yes. Because I identified as E4 promotable, I was assigned to the barracks with all the other E4s and NCOs going through the same school for retraining. No drill sergeants for me!
My Mum was a very formidable Italian lady (all five feet three inches of her!) and took very little nonsense from anybody!! When my sister was 15 and I was 9 my sister went out for the night with a young guy who was 18 (Mum didn’t know this or it would not have been allowed) She was told to be back by 10.00 pm, no later! Midnight approached and my parents were not happy (this was in the days before Mobile Phones) They finally turned up and my Dad went out to remonstrate with the young man whilst my Mum exploded at my sister who was well aware what kind of trouble she was in. Dad came back in with a cut lip where the young Guy had punched him!! Mum grabbed one of my Dad’s hobnail boots went outside and proceeded to bash the young guy around the head and shoulders, loudly cursing him in Italian! The guy screamed at my Mum that he would get the Police on her, she shouted back ‘Do it! my daughter’s 15!! I’ll have you in prison! and every syllable corresponded with another blow to his head and face! After about 10 minutes of the the guy ran away screaming in fear. The next day, right outside our house, the pavement was covered with bloodstains!
New IRS $600 Tax Rule For 2023 (Venmo & Cash App & PayPal)
Americans screwed over YET AGAIN. Good thing, everything is in my Chinese family, not me personally. $20,000 threshold to $600. No fucking way!
You need a drivers license in order to drive your privately owned automobile on public roads. If you drive on your own private property, or someone else’s private property with their permission? No.
The whackos who told you that a driver’s license is for commercial drivers belong to a weird fringe conspiracy cult called “Sovereign Citizens.” To give you an idea how dumb these loonies are, they’re the ones that Flat Earthers point to and say “god, those people will believe anything.”
Sovereign Citizens have all kinds of bizarre beliefs that basically focus on the notion “you do not have to obey any law you do not consent to.” They believe they do not have to obey any law enforcement officers except county sheriffs, they do not have to pay taxes, and that (yes, I’m serious) the Federal government sells each American citizen at birth, and so a “birth certificate” is actually a record of sale to a foreign government.
As you might imagine, these dingbats get arrested rather frequently. When they do, they generally go into court shaking their fists and screaming that the government has no jurisdiction over them and no right to put them on trial, which…goes about as well as you might imagine.
People and people, but this will put Americans into a coma:
Older people going naked in city center parks. (I am not going to post pictures, because if I do I will get blocked by Quora moderators who obviously are not German and have never been to Germany).
16 year olds drinking beer or wine.
Kids riding alone on buses and trains.
Autobahn on a Friday.
Some people will behave like concentration camp guards but when you forget your credit card they will send it to you in the mail.
The U.S. thinks that it is exceptional and that the U.S. must always lord over the world. There lies the problem it is certainly not exceptionally strong or good. It may be seen as exceptionally cruel and evil to the developing nations of the world.
China’s phenomenal growth and rise in a way, together with the phenomenal rise of the non western world has resulted in the ending of a Western centric or U.S. dominated world that is in fact a virtual colonisation post colonialism for 300 odd years.
In effect the poor and underdeveloped countries were forced or connived into the so call rules based international order but in effect it is a set of rules to preserve the wealth of the west and continue the looting and theft of resources of the poor to enriched the west. From 1946-at least 2000. You can call this virtual colonialism.
China together with BRICS effectively put and end or at least the beginning of the end of this virtual colonialism order. That upset the U.S. to no end. That is easy to understand. If the biggest mafia in town lost its ability to steal, to or loot at will it may burnt down some buildings and businesses and probably go on a shooting spree. So you can expect war mongering and doing some shit.
But it does not matter what or how U.S. rave and rant. Asia alone represents 60% of the worlds GDP and U.S. is now a mere shadow of itself since 1945 where its economy alone represented 52% of the world’s economy. Today in 2023 China’s growth alone is 36.4% and the entire G7 including the U.S. together adds up to a mere 25.6%! The Ukraine war and the U.S. sanctions and pure robbery of Russia’s reserves will lead to the end of U.S. dollar hegemony and so will western financial institutions.
To me the more the U.S. try to curb China the faster China will eclipse the U.S. There is nothing the U.S. that can do that don’t make the status worst for the U.S. Today it tries to stop the export of Chips to China. It won’t work. It actually means it actually heighten. It’s inflation and suffer crippling shortages. You see China itself now represent 30% of world demand and another 30% of worlds manufacturing. This ban in effect, deprives the U.S. companies of doing business to 50–60% of the world’s demand.
This act will means bankrupting US and its allies chip makers. China will face some challenges. But in a short 5 years 90% of its chips requirements will be Chinese made and in a decade China will totally handle its own demand and it will totally kill off the U.S. chips. Like everything China will make it faster, better and cheaper.
ANGRY Young Man DIES; Meets ANCIENT Soul Family He Has Known for LIFETIMES!
Still shot of a Blackwater contractor during the Battle of Najaf in April of 2004
Service members of different stripes in a circumstantial combat situation can certainly order each other around if it’s in a joint environment, but in the most recent conflicts, now private military contractors may just be giving the orders too.
During the Battle of Najaf in the early days of the Iraq War, Iraqi insurgents from the Mahdi Army began to surround a Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) Building within the city of Najaf. Within the confines of the CPA compound, the personnel consisted of CPA employees, Spanish/El Salvadoran soldiers, a detachment of US Marines, and an eight man team of Blackwater contractors.
The situation was deteriorating with insurgents having grabbed an unfortunate El Salvadoran soldier, shoving a grenade into his mouth then pulling the pin in full view of the CPA compound. This was on top of the firefights were breaking out between those in the CPA compound and insurgents who were now attempting storm the compound with the mob that had just killed the soldier.
While this was all occurring, a Blackwater contractor called for help to his higher up’s in Baghdad who had been monitoring the situation. The Blackwater contractors in Baghdad then made an ultimate judgment call to intervene with the CPA compound battle when it became apparent that the US military itself will not provide any sort of assistance in the confusion.
Three Little Bird helicopters were then loaded up with six Blackwater contractors coupled with one Little Bird filled with boxes of ammunition and equipment due to the CPA contractors notifying that they were now dangerously low on ammunition.
The contractors then flew to the CPA compound, unloaded the ammunition and additional support, then evacuated a wounded Marine who had been shot during the battle.
With the additional support of the contractors and ammunition, the combined force of Blackwater contractors, Marines, Coalition troops managed to keep the insurgents from reaching the CPA compound. CPA employees would reload empty magazines then run it up to the men who were fighting off the insurgents, keeping everyone busy.
The Blackwater contractors would find themselves dictating where the Marines and other troops to head to during the battle, which would later draw controversy from critics who claimed that now mercenaries were giving orders to military troops.
Eventually, the siege of the CPA compound would subside after almost two days of battle which could be viewed on many videos via Youtube.
Infamous video of Blackwater contractor Travis Haley during the Battle of Najaf. Critics would later use this video to denote how he had no qualms killing random people with a second nature attitude when he was literally going after insurgents attempting to assault the compound.
The Battle of Najaf would serve as an example of how private military contractors mixed with troops in circumstances that called them to fight side by side.
This does not look like it would end anytime soon with the Russo-Ukraine conflict where Russian private military contractors from the Wagner Group and Russian troops are fighting alongside each other in the conflict.
SCOTT RITTER, ANDREI MARTYANOV, AND GARLAND NIXON JOIN ON NATO, UKRAINE’S TIME RUNS OUT
In this special roundtable, Scott Ritter Andrei Martyanov and Garland Nixon join the program to discuss the ongoing developments of the Ukraine proxy war, what it tells us about Russia, and the growth of the multipolar world in the context of history.
I’m going to try to provide an answer with a slightly different perspective.
First off, I’m an Australian Chinese (in that order), born and educated in Singapore. My family is Peranakan or Straits-born meaning that we were the products of intermarriage between the Chinese and locals in what was then British Malaya.
So I grew up speaking English and Malay and a smattering of dialects. As I was educated in English mission schools, I did not learn Mandarin.
As far as I can remember, I was taught to hate Chinese and Communists. Pretty much everything I read about Communists described them as a threat peace-loving people everywhere. And China was communist.
I think I was 17 when I first read Dick Wilson’s A Quarter of Mankind. This was followed by Emmanuel Hsu’s The Rise of Modern China. In those pages I glimpsed a very different China. So I started reading Chinese history, from the Qin dynasty, and continued my inquiry at university.
Most of my working life was spent as a journalist, a sub-editor to be specific, and much of my work involved, among other things, fact checking.
Nixon’s ping-pong diplomacy opened up a new era of ties with China and Singapore was quick to get in on the act (read quick to realise the profits that could be made trading with China. That is the subject of a whole different set of questions and answers). Trading with the enemy? No, it cannot be. But it was.
The opening up of relations with China also led to a relaxation of travel restrictions on travel to the Middle Kingdom. Up till then, I had visited Hong Kong and could only imagine life across the border. I also visited Taiwan and imagined China to be everything the opposite of Taiwan.
Fast-forward many years when I moved to Australia and started travelling to China (Shenzhen, Chengdu, Guangdong, and Shanghai).
I saw modern cities, efficient public transport, rampant capitalism, and I felt completely safe even in quiet streets in the wee hours of the morning.
Many of the Chinese I met were as friendly as people in other places that I have travelled. Often friendlier. Especially to an ethnic Chinese who did not speak the language (I started learning conversational Mandarin at 54 and can now read a write a little).
To the core of the question: Much of the information about China that’s peddled about is false. Many people have very wrong impressions and ideas about the PRC. And most of the people who hold these ideas will never go to China to see and verify for themselves if what is reported is anywhere near the truth.
So I, and many others, try to provide a balance by correcting the grosser erros of belief held by many as a result of, well, propaganda.
A footnote: In my youth I wanted to move to the West (America, UK, the Scandinavian countries, … thataway). If I were young again, I would go east. To China.
Netherlands Reconsiders Huawei After 5G Successes
“If US is not learning from China, it is more important that China learns from US. China should never forget who forsaken her in its hours of need. To be kind to enemy is to be cruel to oneself .”
I won a scratch ticket for $100,000 one hundred thousand. the accoutant handled the taxes.
After claiming my prize we had 2 weeks where different reporters were looking for pictures and wanting to do an interview with the store that sold the winning ticket. churches and charities knocking on the door looking for a slice.
3 people i went to grade school with came knocking I had not seen them in 10 years. Family calling wanting to get a share or asking for a loan they cant afford to repay.
people were confused when I told them I spent it all.
I divided it up 3 ways and gave equal amounts to my 3 kids for thier college funds. I
f I ever hit another winning ticket I am getting a lawyer to deal with the bullcrap and I am gonna move to Alaska to a remote cabin in the middle of nowheresville with no phone or roads.
That you can hope to understand China using the English medium.
I am confident I am in the top 1 percentile when it comes to Chinese proficiency in the pool of English speakers beyond the mainland.
I won’t be surprised if I am in the top 0.1 percentile either.
But if I were honest, I will admit as an east Asian that I find it difficult to keep up with the mainland, even though I possess skills and networks to access media and contacts within greater China.
No, it’s not just about the language struggle, which exists even for someone like me with more than a decade’s worth of formal education in the Chinese language.
It is about developing a contextual understanding for mainland frames of reference and how the mainlander thinks.
That is mostly absent in this medium, even among the rare pool of articles grounded in facts. Most are written by east Asians, not westerners.
My advice? Don’t waste time on the China expert who doesn’t speak Chinese. Even foreigners who do are often wrong or misguided, because that is what it takes to pass through the stringent msm filter these days.
The new employee was just starting, his first day, first morning on the job…
Every morning employees would gather all of their supplies, tools, etc. and load their vans to be ready for the day’s work.
All new employees are to ride with a senior person to gain knowledge and get the hang of things. This was our busiest season and the day was FULL of jobs that needed to be done – all previously scheduled and set in time slots.
This employee was in the process of helping load the van when he came to me and said:
“I need to go to an appointment today; I need the (driver) to drop me off and then pick me up, or wait for me to get done.”
Me: “I am sorry, we are too busy to be able to do all of that on work time. If it is important why don’t you just take the day off, go to your appointment and come back tomorrow ready to go?”
Employee: “Are you F@*king kidding me? What kind of place is this that you don’t care about your employees!!”
Me: “Ummmm, I said you can have the day off, it’s your first day here and I still said go ahead and take the day and come back tomorrow ready to go, I am not sure I understand?”
Employee: “This is BullS@@t, I can’t believe you won’t take care of your employees and have him drive me to my appointment across town and wait for me, you’re F@*ing ridiculous.”
Me: “Um, I am trying to be reasonable here and work with you. How about you can take your own car and follow behind him and when you need to go you can just cut out and go to your appointment. We don’t have the time to do that for you. ”
Employee: “This is ridiculous, I can’t believe you treat your employees this way, you are being so unfair, this is Bull S#@t, F@*!ng ridiculous!”
Me: “Actually, why don’t you go ahead and go home and not come back at all. Thank you for your time.”
Employee then was shocked that I fired him and could not believe or understand why I was letting him go.
This was truly shocking to me. Fired him on the spot within ONE hour of being employed.
“Ukrainian soldiers are being DRUGGED and forced to fight” Ex-CIA Larry Johnson
We now have reports that captured Ukrainian soldiers are turning up drugged out of their minds on some kind of inhibition blocker. Reports say these soldiers are going on withdrawals after being captured. Ex-CIA analyst Larry Johnson joins us to discuss.
The relationship with China from the U.S. perspective as always needs to be one of subservience and submissive to the U.S. That has been the default mode of what US expect it to be since 1945. Let’s call a spade a spade. The U.S. cannot deal with a nation that can and will say no to the U.S.
But if I should be completely honest to the US I will recommend to them to move on and keep your winnings. China with 1.4 billion highly discipline, extremely hard working people who are driven and industrious, today equipped with the state of art infrastructure and leading in 37/44 key and strategic technology cannot be push aside without untold damages to the U.S. itself.
But the U.S. political system, one based totally on popularity contest means that it cannot be pragmatic and realistic. It has to drain tremendous resources to try to keep its hegemonic place, even if it means bankrupting the U.S. that is precisely what the U.S is doing today.
For China is is so simple. Let the US have a long and strong rope to hang itself slowly to death. Lure the U.S. to fight China in a way that drains away the U.S. resources, influence and turned away its allies one by one. It does that be staying the moral high ground. It is the U.S. that is desperate so while the U.S. goes low, China stays high. It is winning without a fight. Remember Mohamad Ali “Rope a dope” the big George Foreman drains all its energy and knock him out in 15 rounds.
China is doing the “rope a dope” while the U.S. is ranting and panting away. Trump thought it wins popularity by starting the trade war with China. China pretends to avoid war but knows so well that it will hurt and harm the U.S. several folds of what it hurts China. Do you notice Biden wants to end the tariff and China says. Not so fast Amigo!
The implications to US allies are particularly bad and the more of a U.S. lackey the worst it gets. Asia is doing just fine and dandy.
How did it come to be? Well China grew astronomically strong economically, politically and even militarily and the U.S. is in denial and Americans are ignorant and naive about China till it is way past too late. The U.S. is in a quick sand. The more it struggles. The faster it sinks.
Since you asked about implications, The US pay the highest price for doing shit on China. The world is moving on faster than the U.S. realised. The U.S. dollar hegemony is all but gone. The U.S. and western order may appeal to a handful of its close allies. No different from a pack of street hoodlums hanging on to its biggest bully as beneficiaries.
US debts will reach 100 trillion in a decade, US deficits cannot go down. It cannot make anything at less than twice it cost worldwide. US standard of living has stagnated back 60 years to the 1960s. And the poor U.S. growing while it’s middle class is collapsing.
Meanwhile for China, you ain’t seen nothing yet! Once it made T-shirts and Toys. Today it makes your computers and smartphones. Soon it makes your EVs and AI and Jet planes. It middle class is now at 700 million will grow to 1 billion people within a generation. 4–6 times the size of the U.S. middle income.
Harvard Economist Reveals Shocking SECRET About China In 2023
Dr. Keyu Jin is one of the most outstanding China insiders. She is a professor at the London School of Economics and has an incredible knowledge of how the US and China both work. In today’s video I share with you her insights into China innovation and how China really works.
16 People Describe What A Dead Body Smell Like
1. “Understand that a pound or two of rotten meat only gives you a faint whiff of the smell of a full-grown corpse. The power of the smell is incredible. Personally, I’m not sure it’s describable. You want to gag when you’re fifty feet away. It can take years for the smell to leave a house. It just lingers in the background. Cars are totalled by the insurance company for the odor. And the guy driving the wrecker can’t drive fast enough to get away from the smell.
It gets on your skin and clothes. (People use bio-suits for body removal for a reason.) Maggots abound, fluids abound, and I’ve never read a good description of the experience. No matter how well you write, it will be but a pale imitation of the experience.”
2. “Buy a Boston Butt pork roast and let it rot. Pigs and humans are apparently similar, meat-wise. It actually turns like a sea blue-green color. (It smells like farts and then gets worse.)”
3. “A dead body, specifically a human corpse has a rank and pungent smell mixed with a tinge of sickening sweetness. Imagine a rotting piece of meat with a couple drops of cheap perfume and you’re halfway to understanding what a human corpse smells like.”
4. “It varies from person to person and how long they have been decomposing.
You get a very sharp, foul smell similar to horrible cheese mixed with the same smell you get from a full trash can in the sun.
If the body decompressed and they had a full bladder, you’ll also smell body fluids, so stale urine and straight fecal matter. For those who don’t know, toilet poop smells bad, but shit that is airborne, not water logged or anything is straight horrific on its own.
If you have flying insect and larva development increase smell this far times two. If it’s hot outside times three and if it’s cold out and the heat in the house is cranked it’s times five at minimum for the dry heat.
The worse part is the materials they died on. Wood mixed with death has a woody slime smell mixed with the death ratio above, carpet has a wet padding smell (like cat wizz) plus death and it’ll it’s on furniture it’s really fun as it usually leaks through to the carpet and wood subfloor.
If you’re smelling these things outside a house, you don’t want to be near it when they go in. Cleaning and deodorizing that is pretty rough.”
“I have assisted in an autopsy on a body several days old, and even though it was in a huge chilling compartment, the smell was in the whole complex. It smells like there are a million dead and rotting rats around you.”
5. “Rotten eggs, feces, and a used toilet left out for a month x 1000. It is unholy.
The smell gets into your throat and you can taste it. You will literally run to find some clean air. Even then, it lingers and you can’t quite get the smell away. Even though you can no longer physically smell it, you remember it and it takes quite a while to get over it.”
6. “A dead body to me smells like a cross between rotting meat and very dirty kitty litter box. Very distinct smell that you won’t forget.”
7. “You ever have like a dead mouse or something hiding somewhere and you just smell something awful? It’s pretty much that. The best I can sum it up to is like shit mixed with meat…in a weird way
8. “In my experience, any formerly living creature, whether human or non-human, has that same powerful, pungent, disgusting odor that I can only describe as a garbage can left to ferment in high heat for an extended period of time. It does vary some between species, though.
A couple of other answers written in this feed point to some things that are accurate. First, two chemicals, Putrescine and Cadaverine, are both found in decomposing tissue. Both are diamenes and they are produced as a result of amino acids (most notably Lysine) breaking down. They each gave their own characteristic odor which by themselves are bad enough. When they are combined due to the simultaneous presence, they are indescribable.
Second, pigs are indeed closest to humans in terms of the odor they give off when decomposing. Any animal with a musk gland (skunks, badgers, and muskrats are some examples. I’m sure there are many others as well) are also pretty stinky when they break down. All produce these same two chemicals because when you think about it, any creature that breathes in Oxygen and releases Carbon Dioxide is going to have a similar metabolic makeup that, when stopped is going to respond in a similar manner.”
9. “Once, I took a trip. When I returned, there was a terrible odor in my den. I know the odor of dead animals on the road or in the forests. Mom puts out poison for mice, so I have smelled them under things in her home. There was a rotten odor like this in my den, so I looked under everything, but I found nothing. The next day, I saw some cops and medics at the next apartment. I learned that my neighbor had died and decomposed for days before anyone found him. The odor is sickening. It’s hard to describe fully.”
10. “It depends how long it’s been dead but if you have ever smelled rotten meat it’s similar to that. some words commonly used to describe it would probably be rancid, foul, putrid, the smell of decay, etc. If it’s decomposed down to the skeleton there probably won’t be any smell anymore since the flesh, muscle, and organs are the ones that create the most smell and decay quickly.”
11. “I recently in countered a dead body that had been rotting in a van near my home for 5-7 days. At first, I though it was Korean people making kimchi, but after seeing the body removal with my own eyes I know that the smell was not of pickled vegetables. I work for a plumbing company so I’m always finding myself walking in raw sewage in basements. And I have to say the smell is similar to sewage or waste. Its nauseating and quite foul. Authorities have removed the body, but the area still smells of fragrant corpse. To be honest, I don’t know why you’d ever wonder about this. But yes indeed, it’s very disgusting. As a female I always find myself running out of breath when I’m dealing with sewage, but a body is about 10 times worse.”
Now, death depends on the environment in my opinion. I’ve smelt a few bodies in morgues and things like that, they just smell of death, it’s indescribable really, but you remember that smell. It’s a cold smell, a heavy smell (this is the best way I can describe it).
Rotting corpses of course just smell like any other rotting mammals, next time you spot some road-kill, stop and give it a sniff, pretty much what a rotting human corpse smells like.”
12. “I was a volunteer firefighter and police had to enter the residence before any of us could. The SCBA is automatic. So I quickly put it on a cop to enter the residence of a woman who neighbors haven’t seen in weeks. Those SCBAs block toxins and the cop ran out of the house drowning on his vomit. He claims he smelled her through the mask….That’s how bad a dead person smells. We eat everything. Those toxins in our bodies is what makes us stink so bad when we die. And to make it worse, when I got home I snorted soap while in the shower. A few hours later I began smelling the stench of her again. The bacteria is said to cling to your nostril hair and remultiplies later until it’s gone. I can’t tell you what it smells like. You’ll know it when you do.”
13. “Not very pleasant. It is a very strong, stomach turning, smell. It does in a way smell like rotten eggs, but it is much more intense. That is the best I can describe the smell, but I heard from someone else on how to make a small replica of it. Take a bag of soy beans, saturate them in water,let them stand a few days in heat above 70F while keeping them moist,crush some of the mixture.In a few days you will smell what decaying flesh/protein smells like.”
14. “My brother-in-law died in his appt. & was there 5 days before being found. When my wife & I went for the funeral (just a picture of him, no body) we went to help clean his place. I can’t describe the smell nor will I ever forget it. It permeated all soft things so badly they had to be throw out, we managed to keep a couple tables only. Even the TV stunk after airing out for week.
15. “Take some meat and leave it in a bag outside for about 3 days in the middle of summer. Then open the bag and mix in some Mexican food diarrhea. Add a good helping of the strongest catfish stink bait you can find. Mix well. This is the best that Death will ever smell.”
16. “Living in an apartment building and the guy next door fell in his bathtub (apparently). We didn’t see him often, so it wasn’t anything weird to not see him but his audio books were put on his doorknob and stayed for a couple days (he was blind, they delivered books to him to listen to).
Started smelling really weird, and since my son was just a baby at that time we’d initially thought somehow we hadn’t put a diaper in the garbage and it had ended up somewhere and was stinking up the place, searched high and low but couldn’t find it. The landlady knocked on his door (all our doors, handing out notices) and we mentioned we hadn’t seen him in a bit…half an hour later she was letting the police into his place.
I can’t imagine the smell in the same room though, it was bad enough being in the next apartment!”
No China don’t need the U.S. to survived or even to be a moderate growth economy in 2023. I will argue that containment, decoupling or de-risking of China which to me and most in the world means the same thing, is counter beneficial to the U.S. and good for China in the long term. The U.S. meanwhile loses the worlds. Biggest market or equivalent to the 2nd to the 10th biggest market for the U.S. put together.
There lies the enormity of the U.S. problem. Without China, the U.S. will suffer between 25–50% inflation which will highly impoverish American’s on the one hand with its U.S. brands becoming unsaleable and losing market share by half at least. All these while losing a humongous market.
By right the U.S. ought to not even dare to utter those threatening words but U.S. politicians lose too much to go soft after their media demonised China for a century. Sure China could be richer with the U.S. being rational. But China don’t take threats by the U.S lightly. The US political system is essentially a popularity contest and even if is suicidal the politicians compete to be a bigger China hawk while its own people suffer.
The trouble with threat is once you utter the word on banning China, sanctioning China, decoupling from China, containing China or even de-risking from China. China won’t hold back to defend itself. And China will make sure it will never depend on the U.S. and the west. That means China will totally do its own thing from now onwards.
That is very bad news for the U.S. as China do everything better, faster and cheaper than anyone on earth by a long shot. And the Huawei Mate 60 pro proved beyond doubt that there is nothing it cannot do! The U.S. should really think many times over before it challenge China for American sake. But the trade war and the chip ban proved to me and the world beyond doubt that the U.S. government don’t care about its own people and it’s own economy.
Don’t follow any instruction related to investing money or sanctioning a loan or allocating money UNLESS YOU HAVE A WRITTEN INSTRUCTION from your superior/cby email or whatsApp or paper letter
Never start smoking due to peer pressure or tension. Use bubble gum instead
First Beer with first month paycheck. First hard liquor after six months of paychecks at least.
Don’t express any political opinion or make any comment apart from work and movies and games and sports
Don’t ever go over your superiors head unless he is on leave or unreachable or is a total dumbo
When a woman wants to come to your office to talk to you, keep your door open or ask a friendly female colleague to sit in the office during the meeting under the pretext of taking notes
Never meet any Vendor or Supplier outside work or at your home. Always meet in office and keep your door open during the meeting and ask a colleague in to pretend to take notes
Never accept any gifts from Vendors or Suppliers whose value exceeds ₹2000/— unless everyone else is accepting the gifts and it’s been approved by your superiors
Never ever accept a meeting in a Hotel room with a potential client or customer. Always MEET IN THE LOBBY OR COFFEE SHOP where you have CCTV cameras
You may be finding yourself forced to spend a lot of money by being in the company of your superiors and indulge in pubs, golfing and high class call girls. Resist. Make excuses and resist until they get the message
No more than 120 ml of Scotch / Rum with 180 ml Club Soda Or Tonic Water Or 3 Tequila Shots at any office party , in fact my son makes the excuse that his liver is weak and avoids any drink entirely
Save around 45% of your paycheck if possible. At least 30%
Don’t ever eat Chickpeas, Beans, Cauliflowers, Kadalai, Sundal for breakfast. If you fart, you become a joke and it’s tough to recover your reputation
Never assume your female colleague who laughs and talks to you likes you romantically. Always ASK if in doubt. Simply ask “Are we friends or could this turn into something more”. Don’t presume.
She Is Against Mandatory Paternity Tests At Birth
This is trending in the United States. Jeeze!
“That woman who said requiring DNA testing would open up a can of worms scared the daylight out of me. Is she suggesting that a whole host of men are providing for children that aren’t theirs and letting this be known would blow up lots of families? What on earth have you women been up to?”
Graham Perry is a UK-based China observer, and wrote a good piece on China/US relations which is worth reading at length:
On the surface things look good in the US; unemployment is low; their economy is growing at 2.4% and inflation is falling. And yet consumer confidence, according to Irwin Stelzer in the Sunday Times, is at its lowest in four months. And Prof Percy Allen – in Pearls and Irritations – concludes that American society is more divided than it has been since its Civil War of the 1860s. “According to a Pew Research poll
about six in ten Republicans and more than half of Democrats have a very unfavourable view of the other party. Thirty years ago, fewer than a quarter in both parties rated the other party badly.”
A recent CNN poll showed almost 70% of Republicans do not accept the electoral legitimacy of the Biden administration. And almost 60% of voters lack confidence that elections in the US today reflect the will of the people.
Other polls by States United Action and Chicago University’s CPOST Research Centre found that over half US voters think elections won’t solve America’s most fundamental political and social problems, and almost half consider political elites, both Democrats and Republicans, are the most immoral and corrupt people in America. The US is fast becoming a dysfunctional nation – and that was before yesterday’s sacking of Speaker McCarthy.
But when it comes to China, Americans unite and rally around the flag. Hatred of China is the one single issue that brings America together.President Biden’s #1 worry
is that China will become the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world. Biden has promised to stop that. He has referred to China as “bad people” who when they have problems do “bad things” The demonisation of China has clearly worked. The 2023 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 83% of Americans hold negative views of China. The share who says China is an “enemy” is now 38%. AnIPSOS poll
found one-third of Americans view China as an imminent threat and two in five Americans think that war with China is likely in the next five years.
The US under Bush and Obama held to the view that China’s economic growth and increased prosperity would bring a relaxation of political rhetoric as the number of Chinese middle class citizens increased. Expanding economic rights would lead inevitably to increased political rights and the downgrading of the role of China’s Communist Party. China would become “compliant reasonable and accommodating”. It has not happened. Billionaires may flourish in China (800+ in number) but the Party remains at the apex of power. China has not changed.
Trump heralded a new and antagonistic approach to China when he started a trade war by unilaterally imposing high tariffs on Chinese goods coming into the US. And when that did not work, he resorted to allegations of genocide against the Uighurs in Xinjiang province to try to demonise China in the eyes of the world. But it, too, has not worked. China remains China and continues to be welcomed by the rest of the world in part because of its Belt and Road Initiative – as historian Professor Francis Fukiyama has said “China has lent more than $1 trillion to more than 100 countries through the Initiative, dwarfing Western spending in the developing world and stoking US anxieties about the spread of Beijing’s power and influence”.
Trump’s successor, President Biden increased economic sanctions on China and announced that “he would not allow China’s economy to overtake America’s” even though, as Prof Allen notes, most economists think that this is inevitable given China’s huge population and income gap.
The flashpoint is Taiwan for two reasons. First, China’s long-standing policy to reunify China with Taiwan and, second, as explained in yesterday’s Post #473, the US is worried sick that a confrontation with China could seriously jeopardise the US economy by impeding, even stopping, the export from Taiwan to the US of essential semi-conductors. Within the US hierarchy – the White House, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff – there are those who want to give China “a bloody nose” and fundamentally derail China’s economic growth by military action – the Hawks – before China is way ahead and out of sight. “Act Today Because Tomorrow Is Too Late” is their cry.
There are also Doves who fear hostilities and prefer an uneasy but non-confrontational approach to China. For the Doves, second place to China is preferrable to war with China It is not clear who will win but certainly if the Hawks prevail over the Doves the world will be set on a most dangerous path.
Oliver Anthony- Rich Men North of Richmond (Remix Mashup ft Dax & Jo Tyler)
At Papa John’s Pizza I was getting fed up that they weren’t hiring the sufficient amount of staff to properly run the store. Along with doing bike deliveries I also cashed, took phone calls, entered orders, swept, mopped and emptied garbage. They kept a skeleton staff of 3 workers per shift and whenever they had to pay overtime they grumbled and wanted explanations as to why.
Frustrated and fatigued I applied for Dominos Pizza delivery. This is how snippets of the conversation went during the interview.
Interview Lady: We pay the highest hourly rate of all pizza restaurants. $21 per hour.
Me: Papa John’s paid $20 an hour. This is just a dollar more.
Lady: Yes! The highest rate for delivery riders in the country!
Lady: When you come to the restaurant you’ll be happy to see that you’ll be getting so much deliveries. Endless deliveries!
Me: How much do I get paid per delivery?
Lady: $7 per delivery!
Me: That’s the lowest delivery payment of all the pizza restaurants.
Lady: Yes but you’ll be doing so many deliveries, getting so much tips that it wouldn’t matter.
(I later found out that Dominos charged customers $20 for delivery, the highest delivery charge of all fast food restaurants in the country. They paid the driver $7 out of the $20 charge and the restaurant pocketed the remaining $13 for themselves.)
Me: What are the closing hours?
Lady: 10:30pm.
Me: You mean like only on Fridays and Saturdays?
Lady: No everyday.
Me: Thats a bit late and taxis round here stop working around 8pm. Any transport provided for me to get home?
Lady: No.
Me: Will I be able to use the Domino’s motorcycle to get home? (I was allowed this benefit in a previous restaurant I worked that had this same issue)
Lady: No.
Me: Can I leave earlier then?
Lady: Of course. Due to your transport situation we’ll allow you to leave 10 minutes earlier!
Lady: We are a very flexible organization.
Me: How so? (inwardly groaning, expecting more bullshit)
Lady: We give you the choice to work either as contracted or non-contracted.
Me: What does that mean?
Lady: Contracted means that you work somewhat as a permanent staff. You can work all the overtime hours you want. However overtime would be paid at the usual rate of $21 an hour. No time and a half. The same applies for public holidays.
Non contracted is like temporary staff. We pay the usual time and a half for overtime but as you are non contracted you don’t get overtime hours as we send you home after you’ve made your 40hrs a week. We don’t allow you to work on holidays so you basically get your flat salary every week whereas with a contract you are allowed more hours.
Me: More hours at the same rate?
Lady: Yes.
Me: Wouldn’t that be a lose-lose situation?
Lady: No. It’s a win-win!
Me: Am I entitled to a free meal?
Lady: No.
Me: And the uniform?
Lady: We are the only pizza restaurant that provides free uniforms for staff?
Me: How many uniforms?
Lady: Two free Dominos shirts and a cap. We are having them laundered after being returned by a delivery driver who recently left.
Me: You’re giving me a guy’s used clothes?
No: No. She only used them for two days. They’re practically new.
Me: You’re giving used female clothing?
Lady: It’s a free uniform!
Suffice to say I instantly and humbly returned to Papa John’s and their skeleton staff.
Mystery Cambodia
A nice fun video that takes you to another world. LOL.
It will probably upset some folks, but too bad. This is real life. This guy interviews some prostitutes in Cambodia. If you don’t want the experience then you can pass on this video. It’s ok.
Originally Answered: How can we become a Winner at everything in Life?
What made Muhammed Ali the best Boxer in the world? What made Michael Phelps go above and beyond every time he swam? How come Gandhi made so much more of an impact than anybody else?
None of them were exceptional people since birth.
Sure, there is the claim that Michael Phelps, for example, has double the lung-capacity of most humans, which has been disproven.
And while he does have some physical advantages, like longer arms and shorter legs, while being tall, so does everybody else he is competing against!
What made the difference in their ability was not their born talents but rather the way they approached what they did.
They were willing to work harder and produce more than anyone else was willing to.
They are willing to do whatever it takes, go the extra mile and do more than those around them, which is what eventually gets them to succeed.
I remember reading an article back when Michael Phelps was just getting traction, that talked about how ridiculous his training regiment is and how it was way too intense.
At the time many doctors and health experts argued about his routine.
Today, I cannot find any article even mentioning that he was doing too much anymore.
After about 2 days of looking for that article I gave up.
All articles about him only praise his efforts and his routine; obviously because it worked.
He revolutionized the field.
The same can be said about Mahatma Gandhi, who did something no one else dared to do to make a statement that inspired millions.
And the effort that Muhammad Ali made can be clearly seen by one of his quotes:
I don’t count my sit-ups. I only start counting when it starts hurting. That is when I start counting, because then it really counts.
That’s what makes you A CHAMPION. — Muhammad Ali
Each of them made their entire day about training, sacrificing a lot of their day so they could focus on just that one thing.
And then we wonder why we cannot succeed.
The big question you need to ask yourself is: Are you doing enough?
Are the results showing up in the way you want to? Are you succeeding or do you need to do more?
Now, I cannot give you the exact stats of the men named above, as every page I visited had different numbers they boasted about, most of them disclaiming each other.
So I will instead share my own story and numbers to make this point.
Now I am by no means even close to as great as the men above, but I hope the point still comes across.
I started out as a Writer with a WordPress Blog.
At the beginning, it was just to practice my consistency and I wrote about 300 posts in my first year, yielding a total of 20 followers.
This was very little and so I switched to a site called Quora. In my first 6 months there I wrote about 1,000 posts, averaging 3 a day, before I wrote one answer that went viral.
This was back in 2016. Since then I have averaged about 3 posts a day consistently over the years.
I have been published on The Huffington Post, Time, and many more sites, have over 75,000 followers, 60M content views and get over 1M views a month still, and none of it because I was a good writer!
My very first post that I wrote was a page long block of text that was essentially a Writer’s Nightmare.
The only thing that pushed me through was that no one else wrote that much.
Many people wrote one post a day, if that, some even less.
And let me tell you this, after 18 Months of writing every day, the one viral post did not feel like a stroke of luck anymore, it felt deserved.
The point I want to make here is it is not about where you start or what prerequisites you have.
Winning is not about being better than everybody else.
Winning is about being the last person running in a race where everyone else gave up.
If you want to win you have to break through the noise by either doing more than others are willing to or doing it longer than they want to.
I have seen so many amazing writers leave Quora to never write again because they just did not break through the noise.
Mahatma Gandhi just did not eat, Michael Phelps only swam a lot, and Muhammad Ali trained a bit.
We have all done these things before, they are nothing special when you look at them like that. It’s not like they invented something none of us could ever dream of or did something that was so unbelievable it looked like Magic.
What made them special was the fact that they kept pushing and kept going with it when many people around them gave up or would have given up!
So let me ask you this then: Are you doing anything that stands out?
When you are working out do you do more and take shorter breaks than anyone else? When you are with your partner do you give them more attention and love than they can handle? When you are working at your job, do you work 10x more than any of your colleagues?
Are you doing anything that stands out?
You cannot expect yourself to win by just doing what everyone else is doing.
Sorry, but you are just not that special!
You have to become special by doing something extraordinary, and I mean that in the most literal sense possible:
Extra-Ordinary!
That means you do not overexert yourself.
Don’t expect to be able to train 6–8 hours a day, 7 days a week after having done no training at all.
Take it one step at a time but work yourself up and stay committed to it.
If you have the time and energy, then you can push further faster; it will get easier.
The 3 posts I wrote took anywhere from 3–6 hours a day at first. Now I can often write better posts in 15 minutes.
It does get easier.
Pick something, anything in your life that you wish to win at, and commit yourself to more of that.
Even if it is just an hour a day, if you do it long enough you will become absolutely amazing at it.
Push your limits day by day, even one more minute each day gets you 6 hours more in just one year.
“Let me tell you something you already know.
The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows.
It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life.
But it ain’t about how hard ya hit.
It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward.
That’s how winning is done!” — Sylvester Stallone, Rocky Balboa
Breaking US Sanctions: How Huawei Changed US-China Tech War
Carl Zha talks to tech expert TP Huang about how latest Huawei breakthrough in advanced chip design and manufacturing is a game changer in the US waged tech war and economic war against China. Why ultimately US sanctions on China will fail. The rest of this interview is on my Patreon site
During WW2 there was a company that always submitted excellent paper work, head Quarters noticed this and moved their clerk typist to Headquarters, Battalion noticed him and moved him up to their office, he continued to be so dependable the higher ups wanted him, so eventually he ended up in Eisenhower’s front office.
One day, A hard nosed colonel came in to the office and demanded to see Ike, now. The clerk typist asked him, what does this pertain to? The Colonel started getting loud, said he didn’t need to explain anything to a clerk typist.
Ike came out to see the commotion, the colonel again was indignant.
Ike looked around the waiting room, saw another colonel sitting there, took an eagle pin off that colonel’s collar, and pinned it on the collar of the clerk, and said “ Now tell the colonel what you want”, and returned into his office.
The clerk was a colonel for the duration of his enlistment.
On a daily basis, my team and I would clean toilets, floors, rooms, the kitchen, our rifles, the floor around the barracks, our vests, our magazines and even the dog who lived in the barracks. I hated it.
I truly did not understand why I was spending months of paratrooper training time to clean up places that were spotless, instead of shooting and learning to fight.
And then I experienced my first operation.
My team and I were sent with four vehicles to meet up with a field intelligence unit, and prepare for the operation.
I remember meeting the field intelligence guys. It was the first time in my service meeting men, on duty, serving in a different unit than mine.
Their gear was obviously ill maintained, their vehicles were disgusting and dusty, and I could see the soot on the barrels of their rifles who have obviously not been cleaned in weeks. I wanted to tell their commander he was doing a shit job at maintaining his team’s gear.
And then it struck me.
All that cleaning during training has turned me into a neat freak.
Everything, even now in my apartment, needs to be perfectly placed, spotless and maintained. There are no excuses, and there should be none. An organized living is the basis for an organized life.
The lesson I took from all this epiphany?
There is shit in life you will not want to do, and you might even hate doing it, but truly successful people do the things they do not want to do, as best as they can, because eventually it will pay off in the long run.
China-Japan-South Korea Upcoming Summit: What’s Behind this Surprising Diplomatic Shift??
In a surprising turn of events, China has recently announced its willingness to hold a summit with Japan and South Korea leaders. This unexpected move begs the question: what has prompted this significant change? Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Wang Wenbin, revealed that the three countries have reached an agreement to convene a meeting of their foreign ministers “in the next few months,” with the intention of facilitating a gathering of leaders as soon as possible. Undoubtedly, this initiative is driven by the collective interests of the three parties involved.
This development comes on the heels of China’s denouncement, in late August, of the statement released at the conclusion of the Camp David summit. The gathering, which brought together the leaders of the US, Japan, and South Korea, raised concerns about transforming the Asia-Pacific region into a geopolitical battleground. However, China’s willingness to engage in dialogue with its neighboring nations demonstrates an intriguing diplomatic shift. Be sure to subscribe to my channel for regular updates on global affairs & geopolitical shifts. Don’t miss out on my in-depth analysis of significant events shaping the world today!
The US is digging for a deeper hole.
As Washington reportedly plans to update its export curbs against China in October, an analysis report by a Dutch media posits that the previous export curbs imposed a year ago exposed the Biden Administration seem to have no clear idea of their objectives.
According to Dutch media Bits&Chips, the semiconductor restrictions against China are likely a product of the US struggle between hawks and doves concerning the China issue, leading to loopholes and a lack of clear goals.
To consider the interests of US-based semiconductor equipment and material suppliers, the US government allows the delivery of equipment that may be used to make advanced chips, highlighting the incompleteness and inconsistency of the curbs.
The US Bureau of Industry and Security set a threshold that requires exporters to get a license before shipping to China for equipment that can make logic chips with FinFET or GAAFET architecture of 16/14nm or below. However, the current export controls are insufficient if US export controls aim to deny China’s production capabilities of 14nm and below.
On the other hand, the US may not achieve its intended results if it aims to prevent China’s progress in the semiconductor industry, as demonstrated by Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro, which highlights the fact that China can make advanced chips without advanced equipment.
Huawei has obtained crucial patents on 6G technology, which may allow the Chinese company to thrive in the 6G era, according to Simon Chen, chairman of Adata Technology.
A green Toyota Celica drove into the customers’ parking space and a man alighted and walked into the store.
He was a first-time caller.
He was supporting his trousers with his hands.
‘Please I just need a belt. My belt snapped in the car, and I live far away from here. I am late for work and I don’t have money on me now. Can you trust me, I will bring the money at the close of work today’.
O My God!
First business of the day!
A man I never knew?
And here in this country, Nigeria?
‘Give him, he looks genuine. Could as well happen to you!’, one side of the brain was preaching.
‘Don’t!! Could be one of them. You’ll lose if you do!!’, the other side was screaming and countering.
‘Why can’t we live in a world where we can trust people and help them without fear?’, I was trying to make sense of this mental back-and-forth.
I gave him a very good quality belt, made the necessary perforations and he thanked me profusely and left.
5:06 pm:
The green Toyota Celica pulled up.
It was him.
To make good his promise.
Why isn’t life just this good!
Today, many years after that day, he no longer works around the area or passes through the route daily, but for such a small thing, he is one of my most valuable customers and has repaid the trust many, many times over.
Texas Jambalaya
Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup diced onion
1/4 cup diced green bell pepper
1/2 cup diced celery
1 1/2 teaspoons chopped garlic
1 cup converted rice, uncooked
4 ounces smoked sausage, cut into 1/4 inch slices
4 ounces ham, cut into 1/2 inch pieces
2 cans Ro*Tel diced tomatoes and green chiles
1 cup chicken broth
1/4 teaspoon dried thyme leaves
1 bay leaf
2 cans Ranch Style Texas beans, undrained
Instructions
In a 5 quart saucepot over medium-high heat, heat oil.
Add onion, green pepper and celery; cook until onions are translucent.
Add garlic, cook 1 minute longer.
Add rice, sausage and ham. Cook 2 to 3 minutes to coat rice with oil, stirring frequently.
Add next 4 ingredients and heat to boiling.
Cover and steam 20 to 25 minutes or until all liquid is absorbed.
Remove bay leaf, stir in beans and serve.
The Exhausted and Unable to Survive, the Cat was Thrown Out on the Grass to Die
On the 1st of October, 331 B.C.E., the Persian king Darius III finally had that Macedonian pest Alexander the Great right where he wanted him – on a big flat plain where Darius could make full use of his cavalry and 2–1 numerical advantage against the Greek upstart.
The location was Gaugamela in what’s now northern Iraq. For the past three years Alexander had been making Darius’s life a living hell but it was payback time.
At the head of Darius’s forces were 200 heavy chariots. The plan was, as usual, to unleash these monsters running at full speed into the Greek infantry lines. The weather was good, the field was dry – perfect conditions for slaughtering the Greeks and sending them all the way back to the Aegean.
Things…. didn’t work out. As with any battle that took place 3,300 years ago there were different stories about what happened. The only things we know for sure are:
Alexander’s forces killed or captured most of the Persian army at a loss of no more than 1,500 troops; and
The chariots turned out to be entirely useless.
Alexander knew the problem posed by the chariots and was ready for them. He drilled his men to fall back into pockets that would allow the chariot to penetrate the line, only to be met by infantrymen with their spears jammed into the ground pointing directly at the pocket.
What would happen is the horses, running at full speed, would run into the pocket but, facing the spears, would stop suddenly. The charioteers would find themselves surrounded on three sides and no way forward, and horses and chariots don’t reverse easily. As you can see, the chariots mostly went through the gap in the Macedonian line, only to find Alexander leading a cavalry charge back at the gap that wiped them out entirely.
The tactic remained a military favourite against horse soldiers for most of the next 1,800 years.
When the tactic was revived in the 15th century, it similarly made knights on horseback pretty much obsolete.
After Gaugumela, Alexander’s tactics were similarly widely adopted and the use of chariots started to tail off as they became ineffective and easy to lose.
Rich Men North Of Richmond, but it’s a Rap Type Beat
Made a beat to the song everyones talking about rn – Rich Men North Of Richmond by Oliver Anthony. Had a lot of fun with this one, went from idea to finished product in a day. The song isn’t set to a bpm so forgive me for parts that are off time, it was tough putting it all in time. Also shoutout to @TimGuitarLessons I used his audio in some parts.
As you get older, you realize that people who lie constantly have some kind of mental problem. It might be a habit; a neurosis, or a DMS-4 illness. But they are not “right in the head”. Something (not saying what it is) is wrong.
Fully functioning adults do not need to lie. They say things as they are. If they don;t want to answer a question, they say so. They have self-confidence, pride and a sense of self-worth.
…
When I first came to China I started to compare my life as an American, to that of China.
And, as such, I quickly realized that SOMETHING was seriously, very seriously wrong with the United States.
The best way for me to describe this is to imagine that you are married to a mentally ill person. (I was, by the way. My first wife was schizo-effective; which had the worst qualities of bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia). Then you get divorced, and meet up with a healthy person.
It was like that.
…
I am in China. It is a healthy nation. It is calm and peaceful. The leadership works towards allowing people freedom and happiness, and it shows.
When I was in the United States, however, everything was a struggle. One problem after the other. And today, it’s only getting worse.
…
Why do I defend China?
Because a mentally ill nation is attacking it using every single DSM-4 technique in the book.
My girlfriend was to remove the patient’s prostate through a so-called radicalprostatectomy. It was Wednesday morning, a couple of weeks ago.
And Wednesdays can be tough.
A typical Wednesday typically includes brutally waking up very early, getting ready, driving to the hospital, and starting the first scheduled surgery at 8AM sharp. Usually a number of operations are planned, depending on the time they take, and urgency.
The afternoon typically consists of a large number of consultations.
After consulting, she usually drives to her father’s house (which is pretty far away from the hospital), because our daughter will be there, but before leaving the hospital, she always visits the patients who had surgery in the morning to have a little chat about the operation, about how the patient is feeling, and about everyday stuff.
When she was back home, we fetched a drink and talked about our day (“what a day, what a day, what a day”), and watched some TV before dinner.
Suddenly she shouted:
“I forgot to see my patient !!”
The prostate man. In all the Wednesday hubbub, she had totally forgotten about the patient, and driven out of the hospital with other things on her mind. She immediately called the hospital and asked a nurse to tell the patient that she would visit him first thing next morning — promised !
The poor man had been a bit worried, thinking that something was wrong, that the cancer was worse than she had expected, and that this was the reason why she did not come.
But next morning, when the doctor was in the house again, he was a happy man. The operation went as planned, and the cancer would be gone now.
Just because China puts up with US bullying doesn’t mean China has to put up with the same shit from a much weaker nation. In fact, Germany is seen kind of like a joke nowadays by the Chinese public, politically, due to it staying silent on NATO blowing up its Nord stream pipeline, and this public sentiment limits how much compromise the Chinese government can have with Germany. Instead of sitting idle and just take the unfair abuse on what’s now pride of Chinese companies for Huawei’s standing up to the US, China would more likely set Germany up as an example in the Chinese philosophy of “kill the chicken to scare the monkeys”.
I can see China starting by reacting proportionately with banning of Siemens from some operations inside China, as well as making life miserable for German cars, which are extremely dependant on China as their largest market worldwide and their factory as well since energy prices drove up costs in Europe, but China being China, it would reserve the stronger responses in hopes of descalation, and would only apply them if Germany escalates things further.
Things are going very, VERY, wrong; Netanyahu Tells Israelis to “Leave Egypt”
Things in the Hamas-Israel fight are going very much wrong for Israel. This afternoon, The US ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford Aircraft Carrier Strike Group to move into the eastern Mediterranean Sea to be closer to Israel. This signals ALL the players that the US is moving-in to get involved militarily. The Players are NOT backing away.
Hamas: Moving the American aircraft carrier does not scare us, and the American administration must realize the consequences of this step.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office calls on Israelis to leave Egypt ‘as soon as possible.’ This is a HUGE . . . no . . . . GIGANTIC . . . flashing RED sign.
Egypt was the first Arab nation to make peace with Israel, and depending upon what course Israel pursues in Gaza (i.e. possible Ground Invasion) that peace with Egypt may now be in very real jeopardy.
The Palestinian President Mohammed Abbas, who was safely away in Jordan, is now leaving Jordan and heading into Syria.
In earlier reporting, I mentioned Intelligence info that Palestinians in Israel got word to their allies elsewhere to be ready to turn up the heat on Europe if Israel engages in a ground war. Now, we see they also got word to their pals in New York City, where, this afternoon, supporters of the Palestinians and supporters of Israel faced each other in Times Square. Chanting . . . for now . . . .
American Middle Class Is the New Poor | Renters Are Out of Options
Working and homeless! The new slogan. It’s not always drug addiction that leads to this. We NEED to stop this stereotype. Cost of living, especially rent is far outpacing wages which are not even remotely keeping up.. For people with no roommates or family to move in with and not making more than 75K, it’s rough out there.
After I left the Navy, and before I got married to my first wife, I spent a period of time single… living alone, in Florida… and being a “beach bum”. I went out on a lot of dates. Met many girls, and had a lot of fun. Fun that was unfortunately short lived. I was just a “boy toy”.
At that time, as a “beach bum”, I had long blonde hair, a super tan, and a really laid back attitude. In short, I was “Captain Ron”. LOL
But seriously. I was “Captain Ron”.
Anyways, I was in love with a girl. She lived in another state, and I wanted to marry her. It was a long distance relationship. And so I went and packed up and bought an engagement ring and wanted to surprise her with a visit, a ring and then bring her back down from Pennsylvania to Florida.
Well… I walked in on her… with a “close friend” having sex.
…
The standard boiler plate of next steps occurred.
Denial
Confrontation
Emotional screaming and yelling
Decisions
And departure
I returned back to Florida alone.
And you know, I went into the store and returned the engagement ring to the very attractive girl behind the counter.
And she disappeared in the back, and I noticed that all the 20-something girls were peeking though the curtains and whispering amongst themselves.
There were so many “ahh sounds” and a lot of sad pity on my part.
The really noticeable thing about this event was that I really didn’t appreciate what I was (at that time), and how these young 20-something local chicks thought of me. I was that blue-eyed, beach blond, mellow fun dude… LOL!
An attractive subtype…
Sigh.
Not the grizzly old cuss that I am today, I guess.
Enjoy who you are in your various stages of life. You might be surprised on all the opportunities that you might miss out on. Be brave. Be aware, and for god sakes, have some fun!
I have only been fired once in my entire adult life. I was working as a Case Manager for a national company with remote digital presence, but no brick and mortar offices in our state. Another local nurse wanted my position and started planting weevils in ears up the chain of command. Long story short she was committing a bunch of tomfoolery and blaming it on me without my knowledge at the time.
She got my position, but was fired within 3 months because she was caught committing aforementioned tomfoolery. Her misdeeds were of such a nature as to make finding another job within the field very difficult. She was caught partially because her accusations caused a state level investigation and audit. Which cleared me and cost her, her job.
Brilliant planning on her part.
Fast forward 2 years and she applies for a job at another local facility. One that I happen to be the associate clinical director at. She has been on a suspended license with remediation and stipulations after reactivation, and basically unable to work for 2 years. She walked in to the interview, saw me sitting behind the desk, whispered “Oh, Shit!” and just ran out of the building. I didn’t have to say a word.
Texas-Style Egg and Potato Skillet
Scramble Mexican favorites, like potatoes and tortilla chips, for a fast and tasty breakfast skillet or simple supper.
Prep: 5 min | Cook: 15 min | Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients
4 thick slices (4 ounces) turkey bacon, chopped
1 medium baking potato, diced 1/2 inch
8 eggs, beaten
1/2 cup pico de gallo or chunky salsa
1/2 cup (2 ounces) shredded smoked Cheddar cheese
6 flour or whole wheat tortillas (8 inch), warmed (optional)
Instructions
Cook bacon in large nonstick skillet over medium heat until edges begin to brown. Pour off drippings.
Add potato; cook and stir until potato is tender and browned and bacon is crisp, 6 to 8 minutes.
Pour eggs over mixture in skillet. As eggs begin to set, gently pull the eggs across the pan with an inverted turner, forming large soft curds. Continue cooking – pulling, lifting and folding eggs – until thickened and no visible liquid egg remains. Do not stir constantly.
Stir in pico de gallo; heat through.
Sprinkle with cheese.
Serve with tortillas, if desired.
Notes
Lighter Option: Recipe can be made with reduced-fat cheese, if desired.
Bought some string in a nice little stationery store in Munich back in 1999. The clerk was counting out my change in German, marks and pfennigs, and stopped and said, auf Deutsch, “Why am I even counting out the change to you? You don’t understand anything.” I smiled. Though I understood well enough, my German wasn’t good enough to let him have it.
My ex was visiting Croatia with her Croatian friend about fifteen years ago. Guess both of them looked like Americans. While walking along the water somewhere together two local, uh… gents were walking toward them, discussing amongst themselves, and quite graphically, the sexual adventures/positions/at one time “crimes against nature” they would enjoy with the two gals. As they passed one another her friend shouted in Croatian “DO YOU TALK TO YOUR MOTHER WITH THAT MOUTH?!!” They nearly melted in embarrassment.
It’s done. It is almost a full decade since China is the real superpower and U.S. is a has been. I know if you are a westerner or especially if you are proud American it sounds ridiculous. But. Let me point out facts and not hubris or blind pride.
China’s growth today is 36.6% and the U.S. together with the entire G7 is a mere 24.6% of the worlds growth. China overtook the U.S. where it counts most the real purchasing power GDP or PPP. Today China is roughly 18.5% and the US is 15.2%. Of worlds economy. While the U.S. is one of the biggest spender China is the biggest savers.
In infrastructure the Chinese has the biggest ports, the biggest ports has the most ships and it has build 120 thousand miles of high speed railway criss crossing China the U.S. build 100 kilometres.
On influence. China gets support almost the entire Asia, Middle East, Latin America, Caribbean and Africa. The U.S. has support from roughly 15 nations. The Anglo nations, their vassal states Germany, Japan and South Korea. Some former colonial powers and some small Eastern European enemies of Russia. In most UN votes China always almost has support in excess of 150/195 nations.
In military, China has more arms, more ships more planes and more troops by a very long shot than the U.S. The Chinese close knit relationship with Russia will make the U.S. rather weak if pitted against both of these nation. The U.S. has lost 4 wars against smaller and weaker nations, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
On sustainability China has 175 out of 195 nations as its biggest trading partners and the U.S. has 29/195 nations as its biggest trading partner. The U.S. debts and deficits is simply unsustainable. China is growing at a rate of 3–4 times a year for the past 40 years against the US. And its standard of living has grown 30 times in the past 40 years and the US has stagnated since 1960!
On the present and future technology, in a recents Australian research from ASPI, China leads in 37/44 most crucial and strategic technologies while the US lead in only 7/37. China’s registrations of US patent office has doubled the US for the past decade.
For me China has absolutely and totally overtook the US by 2020 but it start overtaking the US in 2014. What we are seeing is a decade or more of US refusing to accept the status quo. I suspect by the 2028 election the US and America will move from disbelieving to accepting this status quo.
Oliver Anthony – Rich Man North of Richmond (REMIX) -Vapor Reggae/Dub-
[I’m answering anonymously because I don’t want this to come up in a google search — it would suck if my family found it — but I’m sure plenty of regulars will know who wrote this. Please don’t out me.]
My classmates were 100 of the wealthiest kids in the world. I don’t mean hedge fund money — I mean Middle East royalty money. I mean kids whose entire addresses were: People’s Palace, Khartoum, Sudan.
Were they different from the kids I went to public school with in middle class suburban New Jersey? Not in any way that mattered at age 15. (Except they all smoked. I mean upwards of 80% of my classmates smoked. Just crazy.) At 15 it was about boys and sex and alcohol and dieting and who was going where on winter break. The clothes were nicer, the vacations more luxe, but the status games were all the same.
As an adult, here’s the biggest difference I notice, and this really only applies to people who grew up with money:
There is a sense of security that comes with growing up with wealth. A sense that no matter how bad things get, there is a safety net. Even if the net is actually gone — even if somehow you’ve lost all your wealth, your family has disowned you, whatever — it is hard to shake that sense that somehow, some way, things will work out.
Some of my rich friends think they can empathize with poverty. Maybe, but I don’t kid myself that I can. Even when I’d severed ties with my family and had been sleeping on a beach with my belongings for a few months because I couldn’t afford to eat *and* pay for a bed. Even after I’d been robbed a couple of times and put in worse danger a couple of times…
When I got sick — really stupid sick that would have cost me a limb if I hadn’t finally gone to a doctor when I did — I didn’t for a minute think I’d lose my leg. Somewhere deep down I knew that whatever was going to be required, the resources would be there. Whether it meant calling home or a family friend or an old classmate… the idea that the world would let me drown because I couldn’t pay a bill was just never on my radar. It was too far outside everything life had taught me up until then.
I’d have to be on the street for a very long time before I’d be convinced that no one was coming to save me. Of all the privilege that I enjoy, I think that one would be the hardest to shake.
A man, who had sold my client a herd of Texas Longhorn cattle, had returned months later, carted them off, and could not or would not account for their whereabouts.
I was in court. It was a trial to the judge (without a jury) for “conversion” and violations of the D.T.P.A. (Deceptive Trade Practices). I had the bad guy, the chief rustler, on the stand. He was squirming.
The key to the whole case was an award winning Longhorn bull named “Squanto.” We called him “Squanto the Wonder Bull” at the office.
Eventually, he admitted to taking the herd… Finally I asked the chief rustler, “Where exactly is Squanto?” In a flippant remark the defendant laughed and said, “Hell, I don’t know. Probably in a can of spam by now,” and laughed again. He thought he was pretty funny.
About an hour later the judge ruled for us but did not award triple (3x) damages as required by the law in Texas. My client, who was crazy angry about his lost herd, wanted to appeal. So we appealed.
Months later in the court of appeals my client, the other lawyer, and I appeared for argument. What surprised me was that the chief judge of that court was on the panel of three judges. He was old, very crippled, and brilliant. He assigned himself to the cases he was interested in and always made a difference.
I went first. I made an impassioned plea. I talked of the Texas Rangers, the Alamo, and the treatment of rustlers in early Texas history.
They wanted nothing to do with me.
The three judges were silent, dead silent the whole time. They said nothing. They just watched me and nodded. I did not know whether to sh#t or go-blind I was so unhorsed. I thought I was a dead man. They were supposed to ask questions, seek clarification, or ask me if I had a case on X, Y, or Z. Nothing. When I finished the chief judge thanked me without comment. I sat down silently and waited.
Now generally when a lawyer begins to speak in the court of appeals we say something to the effect of “May it please The Court … I am X and I represent the Appellant Disney, or GM, or Joe Blow.”
The lawyer for the rustlers did just that. He said, “May it please The Court, I am …” and that’s all he got out of his mouth.
The chief judge leaned forward in his chair, as far as his crippled body would allow him, and said, “We know who you are and who you represent. What we don’t know is where this herd of Longhorns is, Sir.”
There was silence. I mean the kind of silence you sense rather than hear, like when you know a predator is approaching in the woods. Then the chief judge looked at the transcript of the trial and read aloud, “Hell, I don’t know. (Squanto) is probably in a can of spam by now.”
Those judges weren’t in the trial court. They didn’t see the flippant attitude of the witness. They didn’t hear him laugh. They didn’t know he had been sarcastic. The Court Reporter had not noted “laughing” or “sarcastic” in her notes, which she was prohibited from doing. The Judges could only read the words on the paper, and the words were clear — Squanto had been rustled and made into spam.
”Sir, you and your client are here in our Court trying to justify stealing this man’s cattle and taking his prize bull, Squanto, to slaughter for ‘Spam.’ Is that right? IS THAT RIGHT?” The lawyer was dumbfounded. Speechless. So was I.
For the next 20 minutes those three old judges waged a holy war on that lawyer and his rustler clients and defended our Longhorn herd, Squanto the Wonder Bull, and “mom and apple pie” like they were the judges’ own children. I have never seen another reckoning like that one, not in a trial court and certainly not in the appellate courts.
I got the award. I got the Judgment. We collected the money.
The Rangers would have hung those rustlers. We could not.
But we never saw Squanto or his herd again …
I don’t know why Squanto’s demise set those old judges off, but it did.
As lawyers, we discuss the fact that Judges and Juries are forgiving at times, but never if you injure a baby, an old person, or a helpless animal. This was a great reminder.
I smiled that day. I smile now, and every time I see a can of spam I think of Squanto the Wonder Bull.
That’s not the only story that makes me smile, but it is a favorite.
Long ago, a mentor warned me that, “Human Resources is there to protect the company — from you.”
A manager I supported could not have been a bigger HR nightmare. For example, I was sitting in a clear-glass meeting room with him and three other employees.
A female coworker walked by on the outside of the room. A coworker said, “Oh is Becca pregnant?”
This manager said, in a deep southern drawl, “If she was with me, she’d stay pregnant.”
On another occasion, I heard him say, “I hate the Japanese cuz’ they bombed Pearl Harbor. I hate the Jews cause they killed Jesus.”
Why was he still at the company? He made the company buckets of cash and was great at his job. He epitomized the predicament of the high-performing jerk.
Most HR departments aren’t worth their weight and everything they do is bound in red tape. Ignore any talk of “we are family” — they’ll still show you the door. Ignore any employee awards. I saw a woman win employee of the quarter (for the entire company) and get let go two months later.
I’m not trying to scare you or sound cynical. Just be hyper-realistic as you go into this world and you’ll position yourself to thrive.
And choose wisely when making an HR complaint. People that do often end up with a cleaned-out desk.
China is a master at derivative research today. The world’s best in fact
It’s what morons mistakenly call REVERSE ENGINEERING which is actually dramatic process improvisation
Derivative research is building on existing research
The US were masters of derivative research from the 1950s to late 1970 before they started Pioneering Research
The US derived mainly from European Researchers until then and even today Europe is the master of Pioneering or Original Research
Germany, Netherlands, Scandinavia are the leading countries for original or pioneering research
Chinas research is very PRACTICAL
The Universities fund research based on the value of the research to China
Original Research Or Pioneering Research doesn’t have any viability for a minimum 15–30 years
They need astronomical budgets for very little real life improvement
China prefers to identify research and BUILD ON IT
Most of Chinas Hypersonics, Space Communication, Rocketry is a result of Phenomenal improvement of US Original Research done in the 1970s-1980s and abandoned then as UNVIABLE
Another reason is Chinese are world class ENGINEERS
They handle every problem as an ENGINEERING PROBLEM Or a DESIGN PROBLEM
They are masters at this. The Best in the world on large scale
The Huawei Mate 60 is the best example
Huawei and SMIC solved the problem like an ENGINEERING DESIGN PROBLEM than a Physics Problem at electron level
Thus Chinas focus on Physics and Maths is entirely to develop an ENGINEERING BASE
It would take a longer time, maybe 30–40 years for China to finally focus on Original Research and win a few Nobel Prizes
The World’s leading nations by Original Research are :-
Europe -50. 43%
USA – 31.40%
UK – 7.88%
China – 3.79%
Others -8%
The World’s leading nations by derivative research are :-
China -35. 56%
USA – 26%
Japan – 14.98%
Europe – 13.33%
Others – 11%
China’s Technology LEADS the World (Americans in Shock)
Yes. I forgot how unique and technological China has become. It is so commonplace. I forgot that the West doesn’t really have this…
In this video, we take a look at China’s amazing technology and how it’s far surpassing America’s in terms of innovation, convenience and creativity. China’s amazing tech is making America jealous, and many Americans are in shock. They won’t believe it!
I did something today that will make me smile for entire life.
I frequently visit a coffee shop near my flat in Delhi for coffee. I am visiting the shop for more than 1 year now.
A couple of months ago, a 13 year old boy started working there. It made me furious on the shop owner because he is promoting child labour without hesitation.
I asked him :“ Don’t you know it’s a cognizable criminal offence to employ a Child for any work?”
He said : “ Yes, I know but you’re seeing only one side story”.
He explained that the child is from Bihar and belong to a very poor family. Last year, his family which included his father, child and his sister came to Delhi to earn some money in order to put food in their bellies. His mother died when he was born. His father is doing a job of a security guard while his sister is working as a maid in a house.
The child is getting a salary of Rs 6000/month at the shop.
I went home but I was not able to stop thinking about it.
I wanted to do something for him but I don’t know how to tackle the situation.
In July, he was not on the shop for a couple of days, so I asked the owner and got to know his sister died due to some health issues. It made me feel worse.
After a few days, he joined the shop again. I started talking to him daily to know more about him and his aspiration. He studied till 3rd class but left study to help his family.
I asked him if he wants to study? He said nothing but his glittered eyes gave me the answer.
Slowly, he became my friend. He used to ask me about what do I do and how I learned these things. I used to answer him in the best understanding way.
I don’t know but it created a great bond between us. I was really desperate to help this kid.
A few days ago, I was drinking coffee with a few of my friends. I was asking them a logical question (Which I saw in a video
of Ted-ED)
No one gave the right answer but that kid was listening to all things and said : “Bhaiya, mein batau?” (Bhaiya, may I tell?)
I was shocked, how sharp he was to give the correct answer. I gave him 50 rupees as a reward and left the place.
I decided that I will give him a better life whatever it takes. I started telling his story to people in my network so that if someone will come forward to help me.
One of my friends came forward who is working in an MNC and his wife is doing some a Non-profit work.
Today, that kid got admission in a boarding school.
It will only cost us 40,000 Rs/year and I will pay his salary of Rs 6000/month to his father.
After a few days, he will be in school and I cannot express my happiness and satisfaction.
I want to work more for children if some people come forward and make it possible together.
I was at Notre Dame in Paris. My friend and I were eating lunch on a bench. There was a group of American young adults with 2 chaperones. They were eaching McDonalds (In France? go figure) And way, the finished before Peggy and I did. The got up and left their trash all over the place with a trashcan right there.
Now remember, this is in France at a gorgeous cathedral that is world famous with tourists from all over the world. Me, being me, I got upand loudly said, “Hold it. Stop right there. All of you.” They all turned to me as if I was a crazy lady. Any way, I let them have it about leaving their trash around like their mothers where here to pick up after them. I told them they needed to pick up every piece of trash they had left and put it in the trash can. This wasn’t their country and they needed to respect it.
I think the shock of me, an American loudly calling them downfor being pigs (and yes I did call them that) totally embarrassed them enough to have them clean up the area where they had been sitting.
I went back to my lunch, still ticked that they were so disrespectful of France and Notre Dame that I almost snapped at this lady that came over to us. She said that she appreciated what I’d done and handed us tickets for the underground and to be able to climb to the top of one of the towers. I tried to refuse, but a gentleman behind her said it wasn’t allowed since we had shown we weren’t the normal Americans.
Even to this day, I am still aghast at how the chaperones didn’t bother to have them clean up after themselves. I can only imagine what the entitled kids who didn’t even consider cleaning up their trash are like today.
Incoming years? Nah it’s already on life support and flat lining.
Reddit yeah? It’s got a terrible reputation of being filled with ignorance and racists.
Yet on Reddit there have been frequent pushbacks. You can see the major turning point was Rushan Abbass.
As such the 10000+ post omg China bad started getting pushed back by people doubting.
For a while it was treading water as those 10000 post threads deleted anything that went against their narrative.
People then started noticing the massive deletions.
Their last omg genocide post has 600 posts of which the majority called bullshit. The op ended up deleting the thread.
If you can’t convince even the cesspit that is Reddit and Reddit is calling you out… then it’s over.
I mean shit. On Reddit hongkong (no space) there was a yellow (HK rioter faction) saying anybody in Hong Kong who went to Shenzhen or used Chinese products was a traitor.
He got downvoted into oblivion. The burning of a man in HK really had a huge change against many of them.
This is a highly improbable scenario, as China has shown restraint and rationality in dealing with the US-led tech war, which seeks to curb China’s rise as a global powerhouse in innovation and technology.
China’s strategy to cope with the US sanctions on Huawei and other Chinese companies is to pursue a dual path of self-reliance and openness. On one hand, China has stepped up its efforts to develop its own core technologies, such as chips, operating systems, cloud services, and 5G networks, to lessen its dependence on foreign suppliers and enhance its competitiveness. On the other hand, China has also reaffirmed its commitment to opening up its market and promoting trade and investment with other countries, especially those that share its vision of building a community with a shared future for humanity.
Apple is one of the beneficiaries of China’s openness and pragmatism. Apple depends heavily on China for both its production and sales. According to Apple’s latest financial report, China accounted for about 20% of its total revenue in the third quarter of 2023, making it the second-largest market for Apple after the Americas. Moreover, Apple relies on China’s vast and sophisticated supply chain to manufacture most of its products, such as iPhones, iPads, Macs, and AirPods. According to a recent study, about 90% of Apple’s suppliers are based in Asia, with China being the largest source country.
China has no interest in disrupting Apple’s operations in China, as it would harm both sides’ interests and undermine the global economy. Apple is an important contributor to China’s economic development, employment, innovation, and tax revenue. According to a report by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, Apple directly and indirectly supported 4.8 million jobs in China in 2019, including 1.8 million iOS app developers. Apple also invested $6 billion in research and development in China in 2019, making it one of the largest foreign investors in China’s high-tech sector. Furthermore, Apple paid about $13 billion in taxes to the Chinese government in 2019, making it one of the largest taxpayers among foreign companies in China.
China also appreciates that Apple is a valuable partner in promoting global cooperation and mutual understanding. Apple has been actively participating in various initiatives and projects that support China’s social and environmental goals, such as poverty alleviation, education, health care, renewable energy, and cultural preservation. For example, Apple has donated more than $50 million to support education programs in rural areas of China since 2013. Apple has also committed to powering all of its facilities in China with 100% renewable energy by 2025. Moreover, Apple has been showcasing China’s rich and diverse culture through its products and services, such as featuring Chinese artists on Apple Music, offering Chinese language courses on iTunes U, and celebrating Chinese festivals on App Store.
It is evident that China has no reason or incentive to kick Apple out of its market and supply chain. On the contrary, China welcomes Apple’s presence and contribution in China, as it benefits both countries and the world at large. China hopes that Apple will continue to uphold the spirit of openness and cooperation, respect China’s laws and regulations, protect users’ privacy and security, and play a positive role in enhancing bilateral relations and global governance
During my two decades in sales, I observed many interactions between people with obviously large gaps in IQ scores. They were often very emotionally loaded, and the gaps may sometimes have far exceeded 3 SDs.
I could observe three things consistently happening there.
For those on the high end of the IQ continuum, the opposite party appeared as irritatingly slow-moving. It’s like they only understood every tenth of the words that were said, at best. The same thing had to be repeated over and over again just to be sure that even a fraction of it would stick.
Those on the lower end typically saw the opposite part as arrogant or neurotic jerks who couldn’t talk about one thing at a time and constantly jumped from one unrelated thing to another. Someone needed to keep them focused on the task and not waste everyone’s time on irrelevant asides.
After some to and fros in the discussion, a threshold happened where the innate human ability to find common ground and cooperate for a particular common task—we got to the top of the food chain as social animals, after all—broke apart, and these guys entered the zone of “anti-social” toward each other. Someone else was needed not simply to mediate but to use power to break up the clinch and show them to each his corner in the rink. The enmity, though, lingered, often forever.
Afterward, if forced into shared social settings, each of the two often pursued different coping strategies.
The underdog often veered toward violence. It was either physical—throwing objects, overturning tables, getting into fistfights when drunk, or grave verbal assaults in public. Insults typically were sexually tinged.
The “smart guy” most often tried to escape the company of the underdog, even to the point of not mentioning him when talking to others. When forced into a shared company (board meetings, sales sitdowns, training sessions), he often insulted his enemy in an indirect way. He made oblique jokes about him addressed to the rest of the crowd and fell back before the other guy had time to process and react.
Below, a painting from the sunset years of Soviet rule by painter Ilya Glazunov. He was covertly anti-Communist but managed to stay on the good foot with the censorship. The title is, “The Campfires of October.” In Soviet parlance, “October” was short for “The Great October Socialist Revolution” by Lenin and Co. in 1917.
You see a glamorized Lenin, his right hand at organizational matters inside the Party Yakov Sverdlovn, and the founder of the Communist secret police Cheká, Felix Dzerzhinsky. Behind them, a night of Communist rule envelops Russia for the next seven decades. In the darkness, you see the spire of Petropavlovsk Fortress like a syringe needle ready to inject the poison of progressivism into the mind of the nation.
A campfire casts an infernal light on Lenin’s face. During the first chaotic months of Communist rule, campfires in the streets were an everyday feature in our cities. They marked the checkpoints of the Red Guards on the lookout for counter-revolutionaries and bourgeois scum.
The trio sports the typical cold, calculating look of a “high-IQ” individual prepared for a fight, through the lens of their “low-IQ” opponents. It’s not entirely clear to me how both are distributed across the “progressive vs conservative” divide. But I see the pattern in ongoing propaganda, east and west.
“Law and order” has a strong appeal to the low IQ crowd. Pecking order doesn’t require you to be a rocket scientist. It’s all in your face. Entrenched frameworks and their well-armed guardians are easy on your processing power. You’ve got plenty of time and room to figure out what is what. And if things turn too complicated, you can always join the army and the police force and help make things plain and simple again. “Dirty Harry” works, folks!
“Equality and justice” is the grazing ground for the high-IQ bunch. Everyone has their own idea of what is true equality and high justice. Agreeing on common action needs tons of negotiations, painful compromises, quick decisions, and nimble footwork. That’s a high-IQ game.
What is certain is that the top guys in both camps are “high-IQ” individuals who use social dynamics for their own benefit. That’s how you get American billionaires leading the crusade against the “globalist elites.” On the other side, it’s the “conservative Communists” like Stalin and Mao who have no time for any wokeness and “culture wars”.
Oliver Anthony – I Want To Go Home (REACTION)!
The voice of the voiceless.
“I live in Washington state and watching our farmland get turned into amazon warehouses is heartbreaking. Another great reaction, God bless”
Briefly: after the regional manager called the store manager “stupid,” over the phone, the store manager quit. But not just him—his wife, who was the shift manager, and his cousins, who basically made up the rest of the staff for our little cinnamon roll shop.
It was Christmas, 1995, and I found myself all alone at dinnertime in a mall. Rolls needed proofing, baking, dough needing making, dishes washing, and don’t forget the sales!
I was seventeen, nearly eighteen years old and had been working there for a year. I loved the product, I knew my way around the shop, and even at rush hour in a booth that should take at least three people to man, I was holding my own for an hour until the regional manager showed up to help me finish the shift. I knocked it out of the park that day, and I was always a good employee, getting along great with the rest of the workers, including the regional manager’s wife, who had been my manager at some previous point.
I didn’t bring up the rather loud phone conversation for the rest of the night. It was just professional working the whole time, and when the evening was done, I washed dishes while he counted money and didn’t bother him then.
Finally, it was time for me to go. He thanked me perfunctorily and asked if I could work extra shifts the next day. He was going to call some other stores he managed and fill in with other worker until he found a new manager and employees. That made sense.
“Given how well I performed today,” I offered, “and since we need a new experienced shift manager, might I get a promotion?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want you to be a manager.”
One more employee quit that day. Who wants to work under that kind of person?
The upcoming senatorial meeting is unlikely to address any new issues. Longstanding problems like Cold War sanctions and the Taiwan red line have been extensively debated in previous meetings without finding resolutions. The same lack of progress is expected this time, including discussions on the Micron issue. These meetings, initiated by the US, appear to primarily aim at garnering attention from the American public in anticipation of the upcoming election, as they mark the first congressional visits in four years. Given the prevailing anti-China sentiment in the US, it seems improbable that this trip will result in significant outcomes. Mr. Xi, who is currently focused on addressing China’s domestic challenges, is unlikely to view this unproductive gathering favorably.
I was working as a Test Electrician for a small industrial place that did custom order emergency power generators. Think hospitals and grocery stores.
We were paid hourly and tracked our time on a hand written time sheet. X number of hours on PO YYY.
This chugged a long nicely. The Timesheets were hanging on the wall of the shop, the shop supervisor could see them at any time, errors were quickly seen and corrected and the work got done in a timely fashion. Guy running the shop was a retired E8 Marine who knew how to keep things organised.
He retired.
Company hired in a older gentleman who had an MBA and not a lot of sense.
He did not like keeping track of the hours worked every day so instead he implemented time cards and a punch clock. He also would walk the shop floor with a clipboard to keep track of who was working on what and when.
So, previous system all the data collection and collation is done in one place. New system the time worked and the place worked is being tracked in two very different processes.
We also have folks getting paid by the time card times, not the hours recorded on the Time Sheets.
This chugs along for a month and then we all get gathered together one morning and are told, explicitly, that over time is not paid if not authorised in writing and tardiness of more than 6 minutes at the start of shift or return from lunch will result in pay being docked an hour.
Could you be more stupid?
So instead of working that extra bit to get a job finished up before the end of the day, folks are cleaning up 30 minutes before quitting time so they can be ready to punch out at the hour. Instead of coming in 10 minutes late and taking a short lunch, they just show up an hour late. Instead of coming back from a lunch late, they don’t come back.
Unhappy workers, unhappy customers since the products are not getting out on time, unhappy accounting since the costs of various product lines are no longer the same as before because hours are not being counted accurately.
Doofus MBA was gone by the end of the second month and the E8 was back from retirement. He claimed he hated it but his wife said he was just moping around the house and jumped for joy when the owner called to beg him back to work.
China suspends European and American chip orders, US chip technology suffers heavy losses!
I told you all that this was going to happen. Duh!
Depends. In most places it’s not legal to invade a person’s privacy. So if the drone has a camera and it’s flying low over your property it would not be unreasonable to think it’s taking pictures, possibly seeing into windows or into a privacy fenced area where you reasonably have an expectation of privacy.
So I’d not attack the drone, but rather attempt to identify who owns it and have a photo of it flying in a manner than suggested it is being used to invade your privacy.
Flying low across a property line in an invasive manner would be a type of “tresspass” which is most countries is a 1st time warning second time arrested sort of thing.
Just flying over someone’s back yard isn’t a trespass. Lets say you have an outdoor shower under the cover of a back porch, inside the “property taxed living area of the home”. So the drone flies under the porch cover and takes video of your wife naked in the shower. Is that act a criminal trespass? Most likely.
Conversely, your wife is sunbathing naked in the back yard plainly visible from the perimeter of the property and anyone who looks over the top of the privacy fence. Oh, well, she really had no reasonable expectation of privacy. Now if you live on 20 acres in the country and have no privacy fence, she would be reasonably sure that in her own back yard a mile or more from any other persons lawful access she can sunbathe. And no its not reasonable to say what about a person selling magazines walking around to the rear of the home? That is a trespass I think, as there is no reasonable cause and claiming you heard a child crying out probably won’t get you out of it.
We were on Legian Beach two nights ago watching the sunset…
We were also having some drinks while we were waiting for the fire dance to start. The sun goes down and at precisely 7.00 pm, the fire dance kicks off… and it’s awesome!
A very talented team came out and began a wonderful performance of a combination of Balinese dance combined with your classic fire handling.
I’m just getting into the show when the music starts going weird… it sounds like shrieking in between the beats. It’s really off-putting… even the dancers hesitate for a second – I look around wondering if anyone is confused only to see a big bunch of people milling around in the middle of the seating area and that’s the source of the shrieking.
It turns out that a woman has come down front to take a photo of the fire dance and she obscured some guy’s view for a moment and he LOST. His. F#(k!ng. MIND! He was shrieking at her so hard that his voice broke repeatedly… it was embarrassing to watch.
I was irritated as hell. He was so loud and outraged that you just couldn’t focus on the dance. There was a palpable aura of chagrin from the audience. The distraction and disturbance must have been even more frustrating for the dancers (and the woman who made the photo faux-pas).
The group of people milling around were there to (apparently) try to calm him down and make sure he didn’t physically attack the woman. She could be heard apologising profusely to him but he wasn’t having it. This screaming went on for 2 minutes? In the end, people were telling him to shut the hell up or F3ck off! and he wound up storming off STILL screaming at the top of his lungs…
Who does that?
Who turns a moment of thoughtlessness by a stranger into a drama that interrupts the evening of 100’s of people AND proffessional dancers?! Couldn’t he just tap her on the shoulder if he was angry that she obscured his view for a moment? The performance he put on was incredible for all the wrong reasons. It was a childish screaming tantrum for what?
What did he even achieve with it?
He irritates the crowd, interrupts and nearly ruins a performance for everyone, humiliates someone for a minor error and then misses out on the rest of the performance when he storms off and everyone thinks he’s an angry violent loud man-child who never learned self-control. I *swear* some of the crowd applauded when he finally stormed off…
How bad is living in China ?
It is really bad :
Because I have some grey hair I am treated in the same embarrassing way every time I get on a city bus or on the subway …… younger people get up and offer me a seat.
Recently I had problems with a tooth. One morning I went to one of the dental hospitals. They did xrays and preformed a root canal in a 2 hours. It cost me 1/6th of the price of a root canal I had done 30 years ago in North America. Just terrible prices.
I am invited out to eat or to go to some celebration a few times a month. I never have to pay for the meal, while I am offered beer and cigarettes. I do not smoke so I decline the cigarettes but accept free beer.
Oh how terrible to invited out by the locals constantly. I have been to at least 25 weddings, more then dozen birthdays and half a dozen 100-day celebrations for babies.
There are 100+ channels on the TV, with a few in English as some western movies. The nightly news reports on all the major news around the world. I have internet access 24/7 and spent way too much time browsing the internet from Europe to North America. It is a terrible way to waste time.
I often visit my daughter who works 300km away in another Province. Being so far away, I am forced to take the train which takes 1hr 30 minutes to make the trip with 2 or 3 stops along the route. I could drive my car but that would make for a much longer trip.
The really bad thing in China is access to food.
We have 2 farmers markets within 2 city blocks. These are markets where the farmers come into the city around 6-7 am every morning to sell that days fresh crop of fruit vegetables and meat.
This in addition to 2 grocery stores and a Walmart in the area.
Then on my small city block, we have 14 restaurants, open 7 days a week.
There are even the evil food chains – KFC, McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Burger King, Starbucks, plus all the Chinese ones etc
We have the French Carrefour and Auchan super stores and the Germany’s Metro cash & carry stores.
Worst of all, we have these applications on our smartphones (80% of folks own a smartphone). Where we can see menus of hundreds of restaurants in our area, order food and they deliver it to your door usually within 30 minutes.
If we need to go to the bank, we can not go 365 days of the year. There are about a dozen days a year when the banks are closed.
Schools are much more demanding on students compared to North America, with homework every night.
However they do get a month off in summer.
My daughters students spend some of their summer travelling. The US and Europe for some, others within China or to nearby places like South Korea or Thailand.
So far no one has noticed any difference due to the Trump Tariffs, but according to western media China is under some sort tremendous pressure. Or maybe there were talking about the tropical storm? In either case it was a lot of wind.
That is how bad it is living in China.
Please have pity on our oppression, as we say in my group of expats who live in China as well, some for over 20 years.
Of course we live a large city. The situation differs in rural areas as it does in most countries.
Because life isn’t fair. A spokesperson for the Alberta government said, that since they had banned grizzly hunting, the population has exploded. He said that going into the woods, isn’t like it was before, when Grizzlies had a fear of man. What we have always thought of, as being bear smart, might not be as safe as it once was.
We have grizzlies venturing back out onto the prairies and ripping open grain bins. Probably because there isn’t enough food to support all of the Grizzlies in the mountains.
The bear that killed the couple and their dog was emaciated, had bad teeth, and probably wouldn’t have survived the winter, if she didn’t get whatever food she could. She was desperate.
She was a small older bear, one that had never shown up on surveys, so probably wouldn’t have been included in any bear counts. She was likely forced out of her territory by a larger bear. This was a bear that had never caused any trouble until she was starving.
The couple did everything right. They had a satellite phone and checked in regularly, and used it to call for help. They each had a can of pepper spray, and used one. Their food was hung up, out of a bears reach.
They and their dog were in their tent, shortly after dark, when they were attacked, so they didn’t blunder into the bear.
There have been 7 people killed by Grizzlies within 100 km of me, in the last 16 years.
They ended grizzly hunting 17 years ago. In the 26 years before ending grizzly hunting, there were no fatalities, within 100 km of me, and only 3 in all of Alberta.
Many were mothers defending their cubs.
So as the spokesperson says, what we always considered best practices, might not be enough to keep you safe anymore.
The End Of US Dollar Hegemony | Jeffrey Sachs
“Yes, we have greatly abused the privilege of having the U$ Dollar being the main currency. And broken every Fiduciary rule with our unilateral sanction practices. We deserve whatever the blowback will be from having allowed our Leaders to carry on the way they have.”
Israeli Radar KNOCKED-OUT in the North. Americans Confirmed Killed, Wounded, Kidnapped/Captured in Israel. Nuclear Intentions
As of 10:51 AM EDT on Sunday, October 8, 2023, it is confirmed that three Israeli Radar stations in the north have been attacked and destroyed. Israel has no radar to monitor into Lebanon. It is also confirmed that Americans have been killed, wounded, and captured/kidnapped inside Israel.
Overnight, after what was “Day one” of the HAMAS-Israel fight, an actual TSUNAMI of propaganda came flooding out onto the Internet and into the mass-media. The shear volume of propaganda is extraordinary. It is making it very difficult to discern what is truth and what is fiction.
There is an INTENSE effort to promote and propagate Israeli victims – and that’s OK I guess; they are, in fact, victims of an actual conflict. But there is also an absolutely unparalleled effort to suppress and censor anything factual about the Palestinians. It is almost as if the public is being manipulated into seeing ALL Israelis as “victims” and ALL Palestinians as animalistic perpetrators.
Official sources are very reluctant to provide Intel today. It’s like a giant lid has been slammed shut on factual information; only “the narrative” is allowed out.
I have had to adjust the manner in which I obtain information.
Here is what I can __confirm__:
My former colleagues in the Intel Community, from my years working with the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), confirm that over a week ago, uniformed, flag-wearing, ID-carrying regular UKRAINIAN Army Troops attacked Wagner PMC Troops . . . . in . . . . . . SUDAN. You know, Africa!
I also found out that Mossad has been sabotaging/burning/blowing-up Iranian Drone Factories to stymie Iran helping Russia.
I also found out that planeloads of Israeli military weaponry were sent to Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan in the days and weeks before Azerbaijan launched another military attack upon Armenia last week, grabbing Nagrono-Karaback and forcing 100,000 Armenian Christians to flee for their lives.
What is taking place inside Israel right now, is payback. Payback from Russia for Israel helping Ukraine. Payback for the planeloads of weapons to Baku, Azerbaijan, and Payback for Israel blowing up Iranian drone factories.
It is also payback from Iran for all the air-strikes by Israel against Iranian forces in Syria for the past two years.
Lastly, it is also payback from Armenia for what Israel helped Azerbaijan facilitate in grabbing Nagorna Karaback.
The most interesting part? Iran used the $6 Billion released by the Biden administration two weeks ago, to fund today’s outbreak of hostilities!
I also found out this payback, is not going to stop.It __is__ in fact, “war.”
Moreover, I can now positively __confirm __:
This morning, the Israeli Security Cabinet invoked Article 40A of the “Law on Emergency Situations” — WAR.
So this morning, it is absolutely “official” Israel is at war. This is the first time that this Article has been invoked in Israel since the 1973 war.
Israel has decided to commit troops to a GROUND INVASION of the Gaza Strip. Door-to-Door. House-to-house.
This is going to be an absolute bloodbath.
I can also positively __ confirm__:
Israeli Ambassador to Moscow Alexander Ben Zvi told the Russian Government:
“Israel sees Tehran as one of the culprits of the Hamas attack.”
He then went on to tell Russia “This is how we quietly approached the threshold of the real use of Israeli nuclear weapons against Iran, and a demonstration of what the term “threat to the existence of the state” means . . . from the Russian “Fundamentals of State Policy in the Field of Nuclear Deterrence.”
I can now also positively __confirm__:
There are some 2.3 million people in the Gaza Strip. About half being men. If that half – or a good portion of it, were to come out into Israel bearing arms, the Israelis would be over run. Thus, the Ambassador to Moscow told the Russians that Israel is considering the use of smaller, “Tactical” nuclear bombs against Gaza, in case Israel is over-run. Same with the West Bank.
Finally, the Israeli Ambassador to Moscow told the Russian government that since Israel sees Iran as being primarily responsible for the ongoing onslaught, Tehran would be hit with much larger “Strategic nuclear bombs” as would . . . . Damascus, Syria, for being the Coordination point for HAMAS and Iran.
(Biblical: Damascus a ruinous heap?????)
Ergo, there is now actual and active discussion within the Israeli government of the potential use of nuclear weapons.
If Muslims begin to actually over-run Israel, where its existence is threatened, then Israel is already making known it will use the Samson Option and take a lot of people out.
HEZBOLLAH MASSING TROOPS
Hezbollah in Lebanon is already massing troops and moving rocket launchers. Hezbollah made clear yesterday that if Israel launches a ground war into the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah will attack from the north.
This morning, Israeli combat aircraft are in the skies over Lebanon all the way north to Kersewan, Lebanon.
There have been some mortars fired into Israel from Lebanon, and corresponding response with artillery fire from Israel, but these incidents do not even rise to the description of a skirmish.
RADAR KNOCKED OUT
The big news this morning is that THREE (3) Israeli radar stations in the north were successfully attacked from Lebanon and as of 10:51 AM EDT here in the United States eastern time zone, those three radar stations are OFFLINE.
For a brief time today, Israel had no effective radar coverage of its northern border. They have since moved portable, truck-mounted, military radar into new positions to restore coverage.
TALIBAN to JERUSALEM?
The Afghanistan Taliban reached a deal with Iran that is satisfactory, wherein Iran WILL allow Taliban armed forces to cross the country with the intent of entering Israel to grab Jerusalem. But the Taliban ran into several obstacles along the way.
Iraq did not respond to the Taliban request for permission to cross Iraqi territory.
Jordan flatly and explicitly BARRED the Taliban from entering their country.
So from a political perspective, the Arab states are now seen as acting as a shield for Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
IN AND AROUND GAZA
Hamas says that their fighters are still fighting in southern Israel, including in Ofakim, Sderot, Yad Mordechai, Kfar Azza, Be’eri, Yatid and Kissufim. Mind you, this is __Israeli__ territory.
“Israel will evacuate all residents living in towns near the Gaza border within 24 hours”
Israel has put itself in a bind with Gaza over the years so this isn’t so easy.
Gaza has been set up as a walled off open air prison, where the good inmates get to come out in daylight hours and do stuff like janitorial work for the chosen (their words – not mine) to eek out an existence. Then back through the gates by dark.
In theory, Israel can’t blow up a whole walled off city they created and kill every one because then everyone would scream genocide. But apparently everyone is cool with the status quo open penitentiary setup for some reason.
So the initial thinking is that Israel will just bomb here and there and level enough buildings to make everyone think they got payback and that will be that. It has always been that way. But no one is quite so sure this time. It may end up being an actual Genocide of Gaza.
The Israeli army issued orders to close all resorts near the border with Lebanon.
Most interesting this morning so far: : US weapons left behind in Afghanistan were used to attack Israel.
A high-ranking Israel Defense Forces (IDF) commander said US weapons left in Afghanistan by the Biden administration were found in the hands of Palestinian groups active in the Gaza Strip.
POLAND EVACUATING NATIONALS FROM ISRAEL
Poland has announced it intends to evacuate its nationals from Israel. Poland threatens: If any Polish aircraft is targeted or Polish nationals feel in danger after their aircraft enter the airspace.” Article 5 of the 31-nation NATO alliance will be activated and raids will be launched across all of Palestine.
EUROPE WARNED OF COMING RIOTS
Intel sources are now urgently reporting that Muslims will be on the rampage in Europe shortly; burning every major city in protest of the coming Israeli offensive into GAZA.
The authorities running Gaza know they cannot withstand a full Israeli military onslaught, so they have reached out to Muslims in Europe to have THEM cause trouble, making the Gaza problem, Europe’s problem too. The thinking is that Europe will be able to call-off a full blown Israeli wipeout of Gaza.
Intelligence sources say worst hit will be Paris, Brussels, London, and Marseille.
No Way Out! Rafah Border Crossing into Egypt Closed after Israeli Air Strike
The only way out of the Gaza Strip in Israel was the Border crossing at Rafah into Egypt. That crossing is now (temporarily?) closed after an Israeli air strike; thereby trapping 2 million Palestinians.
Israel has given HAMAS until *today* to surrender and release all the hostages, or the Gaza Strip will be flattened. Yet Israel targeted a particular house in the town very near the Rafah Border Crossing to kill the leader of the Nasser brigades. It was after that air strike that the Rafah crossing was closed by Egypt out of fear of more strikes.
The Israelis believe Rafah will be re-opened. But believing it, and seeing it actually happen are two different things. Without Rafah being open, the 2.3 Million Palestinians in Gaza are trapped and being hit with ongoing air strikes.
With the exits closed, the Palestinians trapped, and air strikes ongoing against those same people, some folks are saying this looks like a Genocide fixing to take place.
Passions are running almost out of control. The Palestinians see this conflict as a way to liberate Palestinian lands grabbed by the Israelis for years, and to then force the creation of a Palestinian state. Other groups agree with that view, and as such, we are seeing Hezbollah in Lebanon calling-up fighters to the Lebanon Border with Israel’s north. We are also seeing Arabs in Iraq and Syria moving fighters toward the Israel border (West Bank and Golan Heights) in the east of Israel. Gaza is still fighting in the south of Israel.
So with fighters attacking in the south, massing in the east and in the north, this situation does not bode well for Israel at all.
The Israelis see this situation as an existential threat to their nation and the wholesale slaughter of their innocent people. That view is well-based in reality; we’ve all seen the brutal, indiscriminate slaughter of Israeli civilians and it’s horrifying.
The two sides, Israel and Palestine, seem intractable.
If it comes down to a simple, brutal fight, millions in Gaza may be killed. This week! THAT would compel Arab nations in the region to come full blast at Israel and try to wipe it out of existence. The numbers favor the Arabs.
Which leads us to Israel’s “Samson Option” to go down fighting, and take as many with them as they can, using nuclear bombs.
If Israel did that, certain other nations of the world would recoil in horror and erase Israel from the globe. And when THAT starts, other nations will hit those attacking nations with nukes and we’ll see World War 3 happen and be over in about eight hours, with the entire northern hemisphere radioactive for decades.
What we are all seeing right now could very well be dispositive of all these issues between Israel and Palestinians; but dispositive with gigantic booms and millions dead to finally decide the issues.
With the US southern border being left open by Traitorous Democrat politicians, “Sleeper Cells” of terrorists have been crossing into the US at-will, for two years of the Biden phony-presidency. This is what happens when election fraud steals a US Presidency, as happened in November 2020, and a dementia-addled man is installed as a puppet, while unknown, unseen, Bureaucrats actually run things.
Vast numbers of military-age young men crossed illegally into our country and are now pre-positioned here in the US to attack us from within. The bleeding-heart Democrats and their useful idiot Republicans who want cheap labor, are personally to blame for this taking place.
As things escalate in the Middle East, enemies from around the world could use that as a “go-signal” to attack us here, inside the US.
My fellow Americans are the most heavily-armed civilian population on this planet. We may need our fellow Americans to step up and defend our own land, as all hell breaks loose in the Middle East.
Americans should clean their weapons, zero their sights, increase their ammunition supplies, and be mentally prepared to do what needs doing if, God forbid, the need arises to defend ourselves, our families, and our land from those who would harm us.
Gas-up your vehicles, have spare gas cans for your electric generator, and have emergency food, water, medicines and other supplies just in case. Don’t wait. Do it now. Once the troubles start, there will be panic buying here, the same way there was panic buying in Israel which wiped-clean the store shelves.
This situation halfway around the world may not SEEM to be our problem, but there are many around the world ready to MAKE IT our problem; and they CAN. Worse, our politicians, ever eager to mind OTHER PEOPLE’S BUSINESS, are already sending our troops, planes, ships, men, and military supplies into Israel. So we are already being set-up by our own politicians to be “in” the fight, which will make you and me targets in our own land.
We’re already seeing minor protest-skirmishes between Pro-Palestinian and Pro-Israeli people here in the US and over in Europe. These expressions of support are mostly peaceful – for now. But there have been isolated incidents of actual fighting and it is clear that the POTENTIAL exists here and in Europe for the sides to start actually fighting.
If Civil unrest erupts as folks take sides here in the US and in Europe, that will only add to the danger for all of us.
Be ready with guns, ammunition, food, water, medicine, fuel and be vigilant.
No rational person wants to see any of this taking place. I certainly don’t want to see all this trouble taking place. But it __is__ taking place and we had all be ready for how bad this could actually get. If it happens, it will happen very fast.
“On a chilly California afternoon, Deputies Anderson and Arbuckle, with the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department, pulled into a Denny’s restaurant for lunch. They noticed a young woman sitting all by herself in the parking lot, and she seemed distraught. And it looked like she had a really bright-colored polka dot suitcase that apparently carried everything she owned.
Deputy Anderson knew something was wrong, so he approached her and politely asked her some questions. The young woman was all by herself… stranded, with no transportation. So the officers invited her into the restaurant with them and asked her to join them for a meal, which they paid for out of their own pocket.
But something kept nagging at Deputy Anderson. He wondered how she was gonna get back home. After the meal, the deputies had her follow them out to their squad car, and they drove her to the nearest Greyhound bus station. Deputy Anderson then bought her a bus ticket so she could get back home.
The officers’ story about the young woman touched everyone in the department, and it was posted on their website. In the story, it said their “actions demonstrate adherence to the Mission, Vision, and Values of our Department, most notably a concern for the community and treating the woman with empathy and respect when she was in a bad situation.”
The U.S. stands to lose the most if trade dispute or decoupling happens by a very long shot. It is simple China’s market is way way way bigger than the U.S. Chinas growth today is bigger than the entire G7 put together. China’s middle class is at least 2 times that of the U.S. plus the fact that China is the worlds factory. It influences the intermediate products hence its commands in excess of 50% of global demand when added together.
Try to imagine yourself as a businessman, you pick a fight with a customer who buys 50% of everything you sell. That is the ridiculousness of the U.S. trade war and decoupling. No wonder during the trade war period from 2017–2021 China grew by 26.5% while the U.S. grew by less than 5% in 4 full years! And now you understand why inflation shot up and why the U.S. is literally begging China to open up post Covid-19. And why Biden is sending overtures to cut tariffs on both sides.
Trump says trade war is easy and not only he destroyed the U.S. economy he lost his reelection bid and doubles US homelessness while hurting the Middle Class badly through inflation.
China’s exports to the U.S. though it is big it is a small portion of China’s world wide trade. Hence it barely affects China. For 2023 forecast GDP, China will grow by a minimum of 4.5% and U.S. is projected to grow by a mere 0.5%.
The last thing the US ought to do is to pick a fight with China over trade. China is not only the most humongous market and for nation like US that needs trade and business, it is suicidal to do just that. But short term political gains is the U.S. priority over longer term sustainability.
The media assisted the politicians to good wink the American people who are ignorant and naive about this fact and that is why here in QUORA there still Americans that thinks the trade war and decoupling is good for the U.S.
I’m 61. My best friend, same age, was on a train station with his son – the platform was very busy, and someone backed into my friend, turned aggressively and pushed his face within a few inches of my friend, evidently looking for a confrontation.
My friend told me later that only one thought occurred to him: “Oh no, there could be trouble here, I must protect my son”.
In fact that son, who’s 6′2 and a very good amateur boxer, lifted the stranger off his feet, moved him calmly a yard away, put him down, looked him squarely in the eye, and just said, “No, mate.”
The stranger looked down, apologised, and shuffled off.
Later, on the train, my friend said a lady of perhaps 25 looked up (he was having to stand, a crowded train) – and said, “Would you like my seat?” My friend said he actually looked over his shoulder before realising that the offer was for him.
They don’t say yes to make someone happy if they really don’t want to.
Even when they fail in the initial stages, they believe in themselves and they only listen to themselves.
They do not pay attention to things without work, but when they listen then very carefully.
They know what needs to be done and what needs to be left out.
They gives priority to their health over any work.
They don’t do anything just to get attention.
They are not afraid to go wrong and take the steps that should be taken.
They know when to give up and how long to keep trying.
They don’t complain about having fewer resources.
They are not just involved, they are more productive in less time.
They do not prepare a list of much work, but in the work they pick, they give constant dedication.
They don’t just take risks, they take very calculative risks.
Brainwashing a Nation!
America spends 500 million tax dollars a year spreading negative news about China. They make up fake news, they pay foreign news channels to demonize china and their own people don’t know what is true and what is propaganda. Welcome to the world of the United States of Fake news on the world stage and you as a tax paying American are paying for it. How does it feel to pay for your own brainwashing?
China-Russia Arctic shipping route
HONG KONG—China’s goal of becoming a major player in the Arctic has long been frustrated by its neighbor Russia, which has closely protected its dominant rolein the region.
Now, along with the ice that encases the earth’s northern pole, Moscow’s resistance is beginning to thaw.
Faced with economic isolation over its invasion of Ukraine, Russia is turning to China for help developing the Arctic as Western energy companies are trying to pull outof Russian projects. The newfound cooperation is most evident in surging shipments of crude through the Northern Sea Route, which traverses the Arctic from northwestern Russia to the Bering Strait.
The volume, while still small compared with what is carried via southern routes, has shot up in recent weeks. Russia asserts the right to regulate transit on the route. It says the demand has driven it to permit larger tankers without so-called ice classification—stronger hulls and other reinforcements to sail the ice-filled waters—raising fears of spills in the remote region. The first of two larger tankers arrived at a Chinese port in recent days, each carrying more than one million barrels of oil.
Russia has joined with China in naval exercisesand maritime security arrangements in the far north, and looked to it for aid in technology such as satellite data to monitor ice conditions.
When it comes to the Arctic, China “doesn’t have to care so much about official Russian policy anymore,” said Marcus M. Keupp, an economics lecturer at the military academy of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich who studies the region.
For China, which declared itself a “near Arctic” nation in 2018 despite being more than 900 miles from the Arctic Circle, Russia’s new welcome provides a long-sought opportunity. Beijing has wanted to expand its role in the Arctic to increase access to shipping routes, natural resources, climate and other scientific research opportunities, and expand its military and strategic clout.
It has proposed a “Polar Silk Road” as a component of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s broader Belt and Road infrastructure initiative that would make use of the shorter distance to ship goods via the Arctic, avoiding chokepoints at the Suez Canal and Malacca Strait.
Russia hasn’t always welcomed China to the region. At one point, it opposed China’s application to become an observer on the Arctic Council, the body of eight Arctic nations that is the leading forum for addressing regional issues, and previously blocked Chinese ships from conducting Arctic research.
In 2020, even with ties between Beijing and Moscow at their warmest in decades, Russian authorities arrested an expert on the Arctic on suspicion of providing intelligence to China.
Putin signaled the shift during Xi’s visit to Moscow in March, describing “promising” cooperation with Chinese partners to develop the transit potential of the Northern Sea Route.
“Russia certainly has the manpower, and it certainly has regional knowledge, but it no longer has capital or technology,” said Keupp of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, who edited a 2015 book on the route. “It’s to China’s big advantage because it can now really exert influence and economic pressure on Russia and develop this route according to its own needs.”
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the country “always adheres to the basic principles of respect, cooperation, mutual benefit and sustainability in its participation in Arctic affairs.” The Russian Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment.
As Western companies are trying to pull out of their projects in Russia, Moscow has sought help from Chinese companies to develop ports, mines and other infrastructure in the Russian Arctic. Russia changed its Arctic policy document in February. Russia’s policy, which previously focused on “strengthening good-neighbor relations with Arctic states,” now emphasizes access to all foreign states—a move that further opens the door to China. …
I reported an employee once who was subsequently fired. She filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against the company and me personally. What she didn’t know, and her attorney never asked, was if I had proof of what I’d reported for. And I did.
She was a clerk and had duties that were, for lack of a better term, timely. She had to get items off her desk before 10AM, 1PM and 2PM. Those items needed to go to another department, who would then pass them onto the warehouse. This wasn’t a difficult job and she’d been hired as an 8:30–4:30 employee with an hour for lunch.
One of the other employees in her department came to me (as office manager) and requested that I say something to her about taking half hour or longer breaks in the morning and afternoon, which were making her late in submitting her paperwork each day. Keep in mind, by paperwork, it wasn’t real paper, it was coding and analyzing from a computer program.
After that, I kept an eye out for two weeks. Every day at 10AM, she would disappear into the Lady’s Lounge (we had a wonderful ladies room there that had a sitting area with sofas, etc.) and would take a nap on the sofa. With no clock to wake her, she would sleep for anywhere between 20 minutes and 45 minutes. She would also repeat this at lunch, and at her afternoon break. I witnessed this numerous times and spoke to her about it three times before I decided this was too much of a burden on the other people in her department, who had to pick up her slack. I took it to the Secretary of the Corporation, who was also the head of our Human Resources department. He wrote her up, found out she was still doing it, and fired her, citing my verbal and written warnings, as well as his own. I have to add, I asked her about narcolepsy, asked her about her living arrangements, whether she was able to sleep at night…everything I could think of. This was about 20 years ago, but the laws on discrimination haven’t changed much in that time.
When I was deposed for her lawsuit, no one asked me if I had any proof, and I certainly wasn’t going to volunteer it. It was a civil case and she was asking for a LOT of money. I’m not a lawyer, but somewhere along the line, her attorney asked for something that prompted ours and mine into asking me if I would show my proof in court, in front of a judge. As I said, I have no idea what type of hearing this was, but here I was in court, with pictures of her sleeping on the sofa. My camera at the time was a 35mm Canon A1 and I had taken the pictures every day for 2 weeks. She never woke up, and my camera clearly had the date and time on every picture. I had 33 pictures I’d taken, and it deflated her legal team. I know the case against me was dismissed that day, and I believe the whole thing was dropped by the end of the week.
Many years ago I bought my first home in a small town called Oakley in California, back then I think they had a population of about 20,000 people not including the Lamas, and the Sheep, the Chickens, the Emus, that was another 100 inhabitants in the town of Oakley. Oakley was not yet a city and was unincorporated so a lot of things were allowed.
I had met my next door neighbors, an older lesbian couple, they were very friendly and helpful and offering any assistance that I may need, I thanked them for that because I was a city boy and unfamiliar with suburban lifestyles. We shared this old fence that was in fair condition but it was going to need attention soon. One day I was mowing the tall weeds down on my backyard lawn, it was in the middle of a hot summer day, temperatures in that town would get up to 100 or more and it definitely felt like a hundred this particular day.
As I was mowing I accidentally bumped one of the slats of our tattered wooden fence and the wood slat leaned over to one side exposing my next door neighbor in the nude laying in the sun. Oh my what a goddess she was, dark glistening skin, hoping that was sweat beading off her perky breast, it was a Kodak moment for sure, but she must’ve suddenly realized the lawn mower was no longer moving because she immediately sat up and looked at me for a quick second then realized its just the guy next door and laid back down as if it were nothing?
So I pushed the wooden slat back into place finished mowing the weeds in my lawn, then later drove a couple screws to hold the wooden slat temporarily in place, and life went on, we would wave at each other from a distance and never mentioned anything about it.
Texas-Style Beef Sausage Rolls with Jalapeño and Cheddar
Yield: 21 rolls
Ingredients
2 pounds ground beef
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 onion, finely diced
1/3 cup bread crumbs
4 jalapeño peppers, de-seeded and diced
6 ounces sharp or medium cheddar, finely diced
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 1/2 teaspoons coarsely ground black pepper
3 (10 inch) sheets puff pastry, thawed
1 egg, beaten
Instructions
Heat oven to 375 degrees F.
Place olive oil in a small pan over medium heat. Add onions and brown for 10 to 15 minutes, stirring frequently. Allow the onions to cool.
In a large bowl, combine beef, cooled onions, bread crumbs, jalapeños, cheese, salt and pepper. Mix gently but thoroughly as to not overwork the meat.
Lay one square of pastry on a board or work surface. Use a third of the beef mixture to form a log down the center. Fold the pastry over the beef mixture on one side, then brush along the edge with egg mixture to create a “glue”. Continue to fold the roll over so it’s fully encased in pastry, and the edges line up on the egg glue line, then press the pastry lightly to ensure a good seal. Repeat steps with each pastry square.
Flip each beef roll so it’s seam side down, then cut into 6 to 8 pieces. Place the pieces onto a sheet pan and bake for 30 to 35 minutes or until the pastry is golden brown. You may need to rotate the tray during baking to ensure even browning.
The Problems that China faces are not Economic Or Market Driven in nature. They are Political.
It’s like trying to hold a massive dam with a 7*3 door
It will crack and collapse as Market forces and Economic Forces crush the Political forces into oblivion. May take a year, five years or maximum ten years.
Why is Chinas Technological surge so fast?
I mean what took US 30 years has taken China just 9 Years.
Sure you may say US already gave them the blueprint but you can’t give a blueprint to a random person and ask them to build the Empire State Building right?
The Answer is DEMAND
China had massive manufacturing requirements and thus evolved Industrial Robots
China had a massive demand for distribution of workers from Semi Rural and Semi Urban areas to big manufacturing centres and thus evolved the rapidly growing High Speed Trains Network
China needs more Robots and AI to integrate the Country having reached a basic level of development and this evolves the Chinese AI revolution.
China wages rise and Low grade manufacture may be affected, thus evolve Chinas surge in Logistical Robotics
Every Technological development is demand based.
Like how US developed in the 1920–2000 period or UK in the 1750–1920 period
Demand based Technological growth is the only real technological growth that drives a Nation forward.
It’s why Shanghai thrives as a Port whereas Hambantota crashes.
It’s why 21% of the BRI projects are unable to stand , because they are Political Ego driven projects not demand based.
Any other Country having demand based technological growth?
None.
You either have Saturated Nations like Western Countries where Pocket Forces cause technological growth (Latest Car, Latest Iphone, Latest Nikes) which is much slower than Demand based technological growth.
Or
You have nations like India or Mexico or Bangladesh where Politics dictates a pesudo technological situation by hook or crook
It’s why GPay works so well but why Bullet train would be a fiasco and why our Airports are all heading to White Elephant Status while our Ports do much better.
It’s why we don’t develop Drone Technology or Robotics or AI at even 10% of Chinas speed. For us these are Gimmicks, there is no Demand.
Political Gimmicks!!!
What Problems does China face?
Stifling Core or Critical Technologies
Chinas growth in AI and Robotics is alarming the West
Yes US and Japan may be ahead of China bit Chinas rapid growth is worrisome in every way.
Huaweis Cloud Computing Architecture is as advanced as any US equivalent at 1/3 the cost.
So the West decide to stifle the Core Technologies that US or the West Develops that China uses.
Throttling the Free Market
It derails projects by a few years and causes problems
How does China handle this?
Economically!!!
Core Technology Companies need Chinese Markets badly. Not just the Profits or Revenue but also the Technological demand based advantage
Without it they will stagnate
And China will bridge the gap faster
So on one hand China invests in its own Core Technologies, brings in Overseas Chinese experts back home, creates more facilities for youngsters and has all technology firms pumping 30% profits into Research
On the other hand Intel, Qualcomm, Renesas and NVDIA actively bypass US Sanctions to keep doing business in China so that they can keep their edge for a longer time.
Boston Dynamics refused to sell Robots to China, and today Chinese Tech companies have replicated to near perfection, four of their best models at 1/2–1/4 the price.
Had they sold liberally, China may have taken 10 more years to do the same.
So how does Technological Growth actually get disrupted?
Internally.
Usually it’s Religion or Social Justice that destroys a rapidly growing Technological base.
This leads to Democratic Divide which leads to Stifling Tech development
So tomorrow if US can being a religious divide in China or pressure Paupers and Unworthy Rabble to demand equality in all areas – then China will be truly stifled
I’m not usually a fan of crime stories. Even when the criminal is caught, I end up feeling sad for the victims: Nobody is a winner in a murder case.
The shows are also super predictable. The husband is almost always the killer. He’s your standard self-serving sociopath with narcissism and vindictiveness running through his veins.
Money, or some new young sexual interest, becomes a convenient excuse to kill someone and ruin the lives of an entire extended family. I still don’t understand why people can’t just get a divorce.
Occasionally, I stumble across a crime story that’s plain delicious. It drips with karma and, in this case, an epic set of last words.
A long workday with an unfortunate end
Susan Kuhnhausen was a 51-year-old emergency room nurse in Portland, Oregon. Her job often entailed holding down out-of-control patients. She’d just ended a 13-hour shift and was getting a haircut at a local salon.
Around 6:37 PM, she arrived at her small house and disabled the security system at the entrance.
She walked into her house and dropped off her things in the kitchen. She’d recently thrown her husband of 17-years out of the house. He had a drinking problem and was abusive for years.
Still wearing her blue scrubs, she walked out front to get her mail.
Susan came back in and noticed something was off. Things had been moved. Curtains were now open and slightly fluttering as if they’d been touched. Things on her table weren’t where they’d been left beforehand. She lived alone. Nothing should have moved.
She walked through the house uneasily, looking down hallways, inching along quietly.
Susan walked past her bathroom. She turned into her bedroom and as soon as she walked in, she saw a bearded man holding a hammer. He charged her and swung his hammer, hitting her on the side of the temple. She fell with him jumping on her. She shook him off her back.
Susan was regularly trained in self-defense at her hospital. They taught her how to disarm and break the hold of unruly and mentally ill patients. She knew that if she stayed close to him he wouldn’t be able to swing his hammer properly.
They tumbled into her hallway wrestling. Susan was a larger woman and had the gift of natural strength. Susan locked both hands on his wrist that held the weapon and was able to shake it loose.
Then, they started wrestling and they fell to the ground and she got on top of him, locking her arms around his neck in a sleeper hold.
She held him tight. When she released him his throat had been crushed.
Not knowing if anyone else was in the house, Susan ran next door to see her neighbor Anne, asking her to call the police. Ann later said that Susan was remarkably stoic given the circumstances.
When Anne called the 911, they asked her what the neighbor’s injuries were and she said, “No, it’s for the burglar”
The transcripts from the 911:
Neighbor: She hit him in the head several times. That’s the hammer he had with him. She struck him, and she strangled him, and she thinks he’s dead.
Dispatcher: What did she use on him? She strangled him. What else did she do?
Neighbor: She put a chokehold on him.
Dispatcher: I’ve got help on the way. Stay on the line.
Neighbor: She has a hammer here.
Dispatcher: Don’t touch it. Don’t touch it. Just leave it there.
The would-be assassin was pronounced dead at the scene. He’d been sent by her husband. Their marriage was falling apart and he wanted her dead. He’d paid the assassin $50,000 to go to the house and kill her, giving him the security code to get inside.
She was later treated for injuries and made a full recovery:
Her husband was given a 10-year sentence but he died in prison a few years later. I don’t wish death on anyone but if you break into someone’s house with the intent of killing them, all bets are off.
And if I’m being completely honest, my favorite part of this story was the assassin’s final words, “Wow. You are strong.”
I was on a jury for a personal injury case. It was my first time at jury duty, and as an engineer, I was interested in the whole process, taking notes, watching the attorneys’ actions, and the judge’s reactions, and general control of the courtroom. I found the whole process fascinating.
When we got to the end of the testimony, they dismissed us into the jury room. It was Friday at 10:30am, and we’d been there since Monday. It only took us about 30 minutes to walk through the instructions, the testimony, and then a unanimous verdict. The foreman was about to knock on the door to tell the bailiff that we were ready when I called out, “Wait!” I explained that if we waited for 15 more minutes, the bailiff would be in with a menu, and they’d get us lunch (that day was a local sandwich shop that had excellent submarine sandwiches). We all agreed that would be worth it, so we waited 15 minutes, ordered lunch, ate, and then told the bailiff we were ready with a verdict.
We returned to the jury room after the verdict was read (to pick up our belongings), and then the bailiff came in to ask if anyone would like to meet with the judge and ask any questions about the process. I certainly did! No one else was even vaguely interested, so they all left the room. The bailiff brought in the judge, and when he saw me, he started laughing, “I knew you would be one of the people to stay and ask questions!” Evidently while I was watching the folks in the court, the judge was watching the jury! That was belly laugh #1.
Belly laugh #2 – the judge and bailiff had a bet that we would/would not be done with the verdict before lunch. IIRC, it was the judge who had lost, and had paid the bailiff $20. When they told me that, I told them we had decided on a verdict before lunch, but didn’t tell them until after we had our food – the judge gave a great guffaw, and told the bailiff to pay up!
REACTING TO OLIVER ANTHONY‼️- “I want to go home”
Amen honey! So good to see our young folks GET THIS AND DEEP!
Years ago, I did a very brief stint as a departmental admin at a large urban university.
At the HR orientation, we were given a lot of the classic rundown about the history of the school, various policies to know, to do X if Y ever happened, etc. And then they got to talking about the overall compensation packages that this school provided. Essentially, and apologies that this won’t be word perfect after >10 years but it should be fairly close, these were the broad strokes:
“The pay here isn’t very good, but we make it up to you with our very generous benefits”
Now, what were those benefits that were so generous, you ask? The two most memorable were:
Partial tuition remission for most graduate programs
Large amounts of paid time off
Now, on the face of it, those two are pretty good, right? Well, yes and no. However…
Tuition remissions, even FULL tuition remission, is only in any way useful if you’re actually taking advantage of it. If you’re not looking to take courses, even if “someday” you might want to, for every year you’re not actually doing it, I’m pretty sure you’d rather have that salary $$…no?
As to the PTO, as it turns out, this was a very normal amount of vacation time and then large amounts of sick time. Now, as with many such institutions, if you leave your position you can only get cashed out for your vacation time. So as with the tuition remission, this is a “very generous benefit” that’s only of any use if you actually need large amounts of paid sick time.
At that point in my life, I didn’t have any need of tuition remission, nor any need of large amounts of medical leave.
I instead had a need of money.
[Thankfully I got out after just a few months, because the above was just the tip of the iceberg for why that was the worst freaking job I’ve ever had]
“What is the lamest “benefit” you’ve been offered by an employer?”
Yes on average Chinese live 2 full years more than the American’s. Go figure!
And to think just a mere 73 years ago their average life expectancy is a mere 39 years ago!
Let me address the many in QUORA that slur China to no end! Tell us what us wrong with a civilisation that can do that! Oh yeah they also took out 1 billion from abject poverty during the same time. And yes the grew from an economy the size of one nation in Africa to. The largest real purchasing power economy on the planet!
Still think demonising China sounds clever? What about your own neocon funded ASPI concluded that China leads in 37 out of 44 most strategic technologies! Or what about having close to 800 million middle class consumers! What do you say? still parroting western narratives that China U.S. authoritarian, it is failing nation and its economy collapsed for the thousandth time since 1949!
At what point do a brain dead Caucasian Chinese hater and China hater quits? Do you prefer to be seen as a pathetic naïveté loser hanging to lies, half truths, fabrications that 95% of the world clearly sees as nonsensical hate wish? Or do you quit while your families still see you sane?
No, China’s goal has been to raise the standard of living and GDP of all of China’s 1.4B citizens and to be the leader in many industrial sectors through its Made in China 2025 development program. Since the Chinese government sets economic and development policy, it has encouraged Chinese industries to move up the value chain and let more labor-intensive industries relocate to other countries such as Bangladesh, Vietnam and Thailand.
Since the Communist Party of China has control of society and major state-owned enterprises, it is able to channel China’s human and economic resources much more effectively than any G-7 country can. This means that China has an advantage in how quickly it can change, and in the scale of the change.
China is an elephant which can tap-dance.
But this feature was not introduced to decimate the US or to help the Russians steamroll the US with nukes.
This system developed because Chinese society is the most competitive in the world, and for this reason, Chinese believe that China needs to work hard to be competitive in a rapidly changing international economic environment.
Americans and Chinese have completely different attitudes to change. China’s economy and society have changed more in the past 50 years than they have at any other time in China’s long history. This means that Chinese are comfortable with new technologies, with working hard to stay competitive, and constantly adapting.
Americans, for the most part, do not like change. Instead of learning, embracing change and continuously adapting, most Americans reject change. Many implicitly believe that the rest of the world should embrace the American way, so that Americans don’t have to change. The division in US politics is all about rejecting change instead of embracing it. Many Americans view the future with fear and trepidation.
This includes many US government policymakers. This is also the reason behind questions such as this one on Quora.
It is fear based on laziness and ignorance.
The simple truth is that we are architects of the future, but many in the west are too lazy to do the work.
The only place they are not lazy is in finger-pointing.
I worked for a few years in a Chinese restaurant while in my teens and twenties. All the guys from the restaurant lived and worked together.
We were out in an Asian restaurant in Chinatown one night and a very well dressed Chinese man comes to the table and approaches one of my friends speaking to him in Cantonese, of course. I’m the only non-Asian at the table.
The guy exchanges the usual pleasantries with my friend, then asks him why he’s eating with white people. They move on to another subject, but then he returns to dirty, barbarian white people line. He tells my friend he wants to pick up dinner but won’t pay for the “Lofahn”.
I can see my friend is pretty embarrassed as he knows I understand everything that was said. I was going to thank the guys for all his kind words and compliment him on his astute observations.
Unfortunately, this would have caused my friends at the table to lose face, so when he was leaving I wished him a good night in Cantonese leaving him to wonder if I knew…
Britain’s Plan To Disrupt Hong Kong Is Doomed To Fail, Experts Confirmed!
On a somber note, the Israeli destruction on Palestine is a (text book) genocidal event. This is just as disturbing to me as the complete killing off of all the males in Ukraine.
There is something truly evil about the oligarchy that rules the West.
Their “heads aren’t screwed on tight”. They are unhinged and behaving in complete disregard for their fellow humans.
No care towards humanity.
Which means that they have evolved into something NOT HUMAN.
I shake my head in sadness.
As Everyone’s Lοοking At Ιsrael, Something Τruly Unbelievable Has Begun Ιn America
I bought a used coat from a yard sale and months later, when it turned cold, I put the jacket on and noticed a hand written note in the left pocket. It had listed things to buy at Ace Hardware.
It said Lye, ropes, tape and a small shovel.
Next to the list was the actual receipt showing the stores name, what was bought and exactly when.
I thought it seemed suspicious so I took it to the local police and they ran the info I had against an unsolved murder case.
After pulling the archived video from Ace Hardware, it was clear who the man was and after interrogating him and his fake alibi, he broke down and admitted that he was the one who picked up a 22 year old hitchhiker and raped and murdered her.
He forgot about the note and receipt in his left pocket.
He was also left handed. Had he not written it himself, it would not have proved anything, but it matched the handwriting analysis.
He also had no idea his wife sold the old jacket in a yard sale months earlier. That simple task on her part, cost him his life and he sits on death row today.
You just never know what you’re gonna get for three dollars at a yard sale.
A strategic nightmare sneaks into Washington’s political agenda: Global Times editorial
By Global Times Published: Oct 14, 2023 12:38 AM
This is horrifying. -MM
A simultaneous war with China and Russia is a strategic nightmare that sober American strategists such as Henry Kissinger have been warning the US to avoid at all costs, and it is also a topic that some US media outlets have become more and more fond of talking about in recent years. At least from the publicly available information, Washington has never previously addressed it as a formal political agenda, supposedly aware of its seriousness and the terrible risks it carries. But the publication of a report by a congressionally appointed bipartisan panel titled America’s Strategic Posture crossed this “red line” on October 12.
The central point of the 145-page report is that the US must expand its military power, particularly its “nuclear weapons modernization program,” in order to prepare for possible simultaneous wars with China and Russia. Notably, the report diverges completely from the current US national security strategy of winning one conflict while deterring another, and from the Biden administration’s current nuclear policy. It is not a fantasy among the American public, but a serious strategic assessment and recommendation in the service of policymaking.
The 12-member panel that wrote the report was hand-picked by the US Congress from major think tanks and retired defense, security officials and former lawmakers. This report makes us feel that a “strategic nightmare” is sneaking into the US political agenda, but has not drawn due concern and vigilance in Washington, and to a large extent, the American elite group represented by the panel is actively working to make this nightmare come true.
A look at the specific recommendations of this report will send shivers down the spine of those who retain any basic rationality. The report recommends that the US deploy more warheads, and produce more bombers, cruise missiles, ballistic missile submarines, non-strategic nuclear weapons and so on. It also calls on the US to deploy warheads on land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and to consider adding road-mobile ICBMs to its arsenal, establishing a third shipyard that can build nuclear-powered ships, etc.
What depths of insanity is the US sinking to? The US’ military spending accounts for nearly 40 percent of the world’s total defense expenditures, and it has been growing dramatically for several years, with military spending in 2023 reaching $813.3 billion, more than the GDP of most countries, but even that is not enough for these politicians. Such a report full of geopolitical fanaticism and war imagery, whether or not it actually ends up as a “guide” for Washington’s decision-making, is dangerous and needs to be resisted and opposed by all peace-loving countries.
According to some American media, the report ignores the consequences of a nuclear arms race. In fact, the report doesn’t seem to consider this at all and doesn’t suggest any measures other than nuclear expansion to address this issue. In other words, it is a reckless approach. Both China and Russia are nuclear powers, and everyone knows that provoking a confrontation between nuclear powers is a crazy idea. Even promoting a nuclear arms race under the banner of “deterrence” is a disastrous step backward in history. Washington’s political elites, who lived through the Cold War, cannot be unaware of this. However, the fact that such an absurd and off-key report is being presented in all seriousness by the US Congress is both surreal and unsurprising. It is in line with the distorted political atmosphere in Washington today.
The motives behind this exaggeration of threats and creating a warlike atmosphere are highly suspicious. The recent outbreak of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict caused a sharp increase in US defense industry stocks, while American defense industry companies have also been the biggest beneficiaries of the long-standing Russia-Ukraine conflict. The military-industrial complex, like a geopolitical monstrosity, parasitically clings to American society, manipulating its every move, pushing Washington step by step to introduce and even prepare for ideas that were once considered “impossible.”
The prosperity of the American military-industrial complex is built upon blood and corpses, and carries a primal guilt. Serving the interests of the American military-industrial complex is unethical.
The reality is that such rhetoric is becoming increasingly politically acceptable in today’s Washington. The idea of “preparing for possible simultaneous wars with Russia and China,” once a fringe fantasy, has gradually made its way into Washington’s agenda, which is deeply unsettling.
If Washington were to adopt even a small portion of the recommendations in this report, the harm and threats it could pose to world peace would be immeasurable and would ultimately backfire on the US itself.
There is an old Chinese saying: “Those who play with fire will perish by it.” This is something that is worth Washington’s careful consideration.
In 1980 my boss had left the company and had planned to sell his very nice 1970 Buick LeSabre for $500. One Monday I came into my office and the keys to the Buick were on my desk with a note saying that the automatic transmission was bad and that it would cost more than the car was worth and that I could have it for $25 since that is all the wrecking yard would give him.
I picked up the car one evening and was able to make it part way home before the “transmission” problem occurred.
Fortunately, I was near the company parking lot where I left the car. The next morning, in daylight, with the help of my brother-in-law, we discovered that the “transmission problem” was actually the air conditioning compressor intermittently locking up and putting a severe drag on the engine.
Since it was fall in southern California, we just cut off the single belt that drove the AC compressor and the car ran great. Months later, a neighbor was putting a Chevy V8 into a Toyota pickup and gave me the AC compressor, which we installed on the Buick. And the AC worked perfectly.
I told my boss how we fixed the “transmission” problem and offered him $500 for the Buick.
He declined and said I should keep the car for $25.
I told him I didn’t want my wife driving a $25 car, so he agreed to $250.
That summer I decided to install an aftermarket cruise control unit on the Buick and while routing wires under the dash, I noticed a small spring, not unlike the ones in ball point pens, was broken in an AC/heater duct. I replaced that spring (cost was less than $1) and noticed that the AC was coming out of the dash vents where previously it was just coming from the floor.
When I next saw my former boss, he said that he had taken the Buick to the dealership to complain about the AC/heat not coming from the dash vents, and they told him that to fix the problem they would have to remove the dash and it would cost more than the car was worth.
I put an additional 100K miles on that car and only recall replacing the brakes and a distributor, in addition to routine maintenance. In 1992, as I was moving to Texas from NJ, a co-worker asked if I would sell him the car, which I did.
As an aside, my former boss went to work for a company that made high power gas lasers, costing at that time about $25,000.
At my next company, I needed one of those lasers. I happened to mention to my former boss at a conference that I hoped to buy one of those lasers, but didn’t have the budget.
A few weeks later, a high power gas laser unexpectedly arrived on the shipping dock!
I called my former boss and he said if and when I get the budget, let him know and he will replace the “loaner” laser with a new one. Probably a year or so later, I did find the money and paid for the “loaner” laser.
My former boss’s company also made an even higher power laser for $50,000. I later wondered if I had given him $500 for the car if he would have shipped a $50K “loaner.”
I would ask him, but he passed away, way too young, years ago.
Rest in peace, Dean…
Life in URUGUAY! – South America’s Richest and Safest Country
As an Uruguayan I want to make a comment. First, great video, mostly accurate expect for a couple of details.
When you show the ‘gauchos” those look more like people on horses from Bolivia or Peru, or even maybe somewhere in northern Argentina or Chile. Because, first of all, in Uruguay, the gaucho’s “poncho” is usually made of plain dark colors, and most important, we do not have mountains, like the ones you show. About population “skin” color, let me make some remarks.
The original population in Uruguay is around 90% of European descent, and when I say European I mean, from all over Europe, including countries like: Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Russian, Denmark, etc. Not only Southern Europe. So there are a lot of fair skin color people including blonde, blue eyes.
But what has been happening in the last decade is that there’s a large immigration wave, such as from the Caribbean countries, as well as from the rest of Latin America.
So, the demographic is changing rapidly because Uruguayan’s population as you established is very small, so the culture is also changing, including the food and even the language…
2500 Foreigners have been invited to the Hangzhou Asian Games in China
Ordinary Foreigners
From US, Canada, Europe and Japan and South Korea
Fully paid for, Business Class Tickets, Five Star Pampering
All China asks them to do is to cover the Games on their Social Media (TikTok mainly or YT or Instagram)
The result is despite the Western Media almost entirely ignoring the Asian Games, a whopping 673 Million people worldwide are watching the events
This is China’s Strategy to counter thr Western Media
Not launching their own MSM and insanely and making accusations
Instead , they bring ORDINARY PEOPLE and treating them to what China looks like and spreading the message
A Popular Teenager goes home and says “Man do you know China is so different from what we hear in our TV channels”
Slowly this gains traction
It’s a long term plan targeting the 19–24 year olds today and gradually influencing the Younger Generation
The key reason is INFLUENCE
The 12–36 year old US Generation doesn’t view China as an enemy but as a neutral country or as a mutually beneficial country
Yet 36–65 year old Americans, the MSM influenced generation see almost 75% of them view China as an enemy
China is slowly influencing the younger generation and in a way that US simply cannot comprehend
Long term, slow and PATIENTLY
Every year you have 20,000 Vloggers invited to China and cover China positively
They influence around 60 Million -150 Million people
Tourvashu is one of these
He influences 2 Million Indians
Most are 16–20 year olds
More likely to watch Tourvashu than Palki Or Gravitas or Arnab
Slowly the Younger Indians will be influenced and say “Yaar Tune Chaayina ka wo Video dekha. Mast tha”
So you wonder why Apple is not banned. In China?
Same reason
It’s not the Chinese way
These Brash, Useless and Economically unsound tactics are not something the Chinese do
China will encourage Apple, use it as a gold standard to develop their own industry, and undercut the iphone eventually
Take the Chinese High Speed Rail
In 2005, Chinese imported exclusively their Boring Machines (Germany, Switzerland), Engines (Japan, Spain), Software (UK, Singapore, US) and Electronics (Japan, S Korea)
Today nearly 90% of their High Speed Rail Supplies are COMPLETELY MADE IN CHINA with same or better quality
They have decimated TBM markets in Germany with export shares plummeting from 69% in 2000 to 11% in 2023
Took them 17–18 years
That’s how China works
These loser protectionism bans don’t work for China
They COMPETE and UNDERCUT and enhance quality with competition
The Trump Ban begun in 2019
So the key is to see if China will beat the Apple and undercut the company by 2036–2037
I am willing to guarantee that they will
It’s what they do
Kind of their Mantra
Banning is what Losers do
Competing and beating with Economics is what Winners do
When I was a young boy I used to get teased a lot in school and I didn’t have many friends. I was a fat kid and often got called a “fat slob”, “pig”, and “smelly or “stinky”. I took a bath at least once a week, more in the summer, and tried to keep clean so I knew I was just getting teased because I was fat. When I was eleven my best friend’s mom drove us home from baseball practice one day. Out of the blue she turned to me in the back seat and said, “Andy, you smell and you need to bathe more often.” She did not say it in a mean way but in a stern businesslike manner. My best friend was horrified and said nothing.
When I got home I immediately took a shower and wondered about what was going on. Obviously, I’d been sweaty from practice but she must have known that. As I thought it over, it also dawned on me that my skinny little sister often got teased as “smelly” too. I’d always assumed she got it from association with me, not because she smelled. So I told my mom what happened and asked her to tell me honestly if I smelled. She said, “no” and started to get a little upset about my best friend’s mom saying that to me.
I went to play outside and saw one of my classmates across the street. We had an on-again/off-again friendship up to that point. I guess we were what you might call “frenemies” today but at this point in time, we were more on the friendly side. I decided to get his opinion believing he wouldn’t hold back. In fact, he had teased me before about being smelly. So I asked him straight-up, “Do I smell?” He answered very matter-of-factly, “yes”. “My sister too?” “Yes, her too,” he replied. Then I asked him what we smelled like. He then told me that this had actually been a subject of discussion among his family who did not want me or my sister in their house because of our smell. He said his parents said we smelled like “old books”. Immediately, this brought to mind the set of Encyclopedia Britannicas I had in my bedroom closet. I immediately went home to check them out. Not only were they covered in mold but vast sections of my closet and room had mold. In fact, I found it throughout our home. But it didn’t smell to me. I was used to it. We all were. We lived in the woods surrounded by soggy tree pools so our home was often damp. We had no AC nor did we need it. This was back in 1972 before the internet and all the scares about the dangers of mold.
I told my mother what I’d learned and was able to convince her this was what was causing my sister and me to smell and probably her too. We cleaned everything with bleach, aired out the house, and bought dehumidifiers. From then on I showered every day. My friends all told me I no longer smelled. That following summer I also worked my ass off to get physically fit. I don’t know how many more years I might have suffered but for this very simple and brutally honest admonition from my friend’s mother. To this day, my best friend of 58 years still tells me how embarrassed he was that his now-deceased mother said that to me. And I always remind him she did me one of the greatest favors of my life.
Flip Flop Cherry Cobbler
Yield: 6 to 8 generous portions
Ingredients
1/2 cup butter
1 cup granulated sugar
2 cups all-purpose flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
8 cups cherry pie filling
1/2 cup granulated sugar
Instructions
Coat a 9 x 13 inch baking dish with cooking spray.
With an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar.
In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder and salt. Add to butter mixture alternating with the milk; mix until well combined.
Spread batter evenly into prepared pan.
Top with filling and sprinkle with sugar. Cover and freeze.
To bake: Thaw completely in refrigerator.
Bake at 375 degrees F for 40 minutes or until browned.
Mighty China Remove All Iran Sanctions Placed By U.S and E.U
In this eye-opening video, we explore the shifting dynamics of power and influence between Iran, the United States, and China. With the U.S. imposing stringent sanctions on Iran, China steps in to form a strategic alliance, challenging the global power balance. Learn more about the economic, political, and strategic implications of this trilateral relationship and how it could shape the future of global geopolitics.
Going anonymous because it is a part of my life that not even my closest friends are aware of.
This is from the time when I was 12 years old. My mom had a problem where her breast would develop lumps which would have to be removed surgically. This problem started before I was born and she would undergo these procedures every couple of years. We lived in a small town with limited access to advanced medical facilities, but the doctors always told us that the lumps were not malignant.
When I was 12, this one lump was growing very big. My dad (who is a doctor himself) decided to take her to Delhi to get some tests done. I have two elder sisters and we (me, my sister and my parents) live with my grandparents.
So, my parents were away in Delhi and my grand mother would spend the day on the phone talking to relatives, spreading rumors that my mom actually had cancer and saying that we three are a burden on them and that they just want my parents to come and get us off their head.
My sisters, who were older and more mature, would mostly stay in their room, but I, by nature liked to be outside with my mom and in her absence, my granny. Hearing these things used to hurt me, but I wouldn’t tell my sisters since I knew they’d be hurt even more.
I started taking up house-work with my granny (though we had help by my granny used to crib that we 3 were a burden)-cooking half meals, helping with washing clothes. All this I did without my sisters’ knowledge (or they’d never have let me do it).
This was a time when mobiles didn’t exist in India and fixed line phones were the only means of communication. News from my parents used to reach us with a lag. We just kept praying that our mom comes back safely.
After tests at AIIMS (top hospital in India), our parents returned awaiting results and my granny immediately left for my aunt (her daughter’s) place citing she needed “rest”.
Results came in-the growth didn’t seem malignant but needed a fairly complicated medical procedure in Chandigarh. These were times when my dad was under a lot of financial pressure (though my grandparents were well-off and my dad was the only son). My dad requested my granny over call that they need to leave immediately and that though he had applied for their life savings-their FDs to be broken, but if it doesn’t happen on time, if my grandparents could lend money till the FD money could reach home.
Unbelievably, my granny just didn’t come home! She made my aunt call in saying she would stay longer at her place and that my parents can leave for the surgery! I still remember my dad almost crying, not sure if he would be able to arrange money on time to save his wife (the tumour had grown visibly big). By God’s grace, the FDs broke a day before they had to leave and they left us alone, at the trust of the neighbours who were more helpful than my grandparents!
It was a long, painful time when my mother received treatment-a surgery which lasted 9 hours, where doctors almost gave up hope, where she was on ventilator support for days. All this while, I kept hearing from my granny’s conversations as she invited friends over, that it was certainly cancer, that such complicated surgeries could only be for cancer. It kept on making the 12-year old me scared as I knew cancer is something bad, it is something that can take away my mom.
We first got a chance to speak to our mom after 35 days when she managed to call from a hotel after her discharge. Those 35 days had been a struggle beyond my imagination for my parents (which they told me much later when I was around 20). With just my dad for company-he had managed everything from sleeping on hospital floors to washing my mom’s clothes.
My mom has recovered fully and still prays everyday for the doctors who cured her.
My dad still hates my grand parents, and I don’t feel any love for them wither.
My grand dad passed away a few years ago and we still live with my granny because my mom still thinks its our duty.
But, the pain is still there, the fear that the 12-year old felt is still there ,the betrayal is still feels fresh when I see my granny.
I grew up in those 2 months, chopped off my hair because I had long hair and my granny wouldn’t help manage them.
I hardened, realized I only have my parents and my sisters who will stand by me, and I will stand by them till I die.
I realised the world is cruel, looking at my relatives’ behaviour in that period.
“Hector, I retired before you were born,” he laughed.
Confused, I asked again, “Be honest, Dad, I mean, when will you stop working?”
His response was simple, “Working? What’s work? I don’t know what work is.”
“OK, Dad, forget about it,” I said as I assumed he wasn’t willing to talk about this.
“Hector,” he said, “what you know as my job is not work for me. I enjoy architecture so much that I could do this 24/7. This is who I am. Architecture is my life.”
So, to answer your question, why do rich people work even after they become rich? Why don’t they play?
My father lived to be 91 and worked until his body gave up on him. He was a passionate architect who found joy in his work. That’s what kept him active and full of joy every day. His passion for architecture was infectious, and it taught me this valuable lesson about work as a lifestyle.
So, if you ask me about retirement or work-life balance, I’d say it’s better to find what you love and make it a part of your life. When you find that, you’ll stop working and start living. We achieve a balance not by separating work from life but by integrating what you love into your lifestyle.
Today, this is how I see it: It’s not about working less; it’s about loving more what you do.
That’s the secret to a fulfilling life. As my father always said, “The day you find what you love is when you will stop working.”
Heavy Rain forced Mother Cat to Carry her kitten in Streets, but No One Opened the Door for Them!
In the pouring rain, we spotted a soaked cat seeking shelter. Feeling sorry for her, we followed as she led us to her hidden kitten in the woods. We gently petted the mama cat, who had braved the relentless rain. The tiny, wet kitten needed our care, so we wrapped him in a warm blanket. Back at our home, where rescued cat families and foster cats live together happily, we ensured both mother and baby were dry and well-groomed. A vet visit ensured mama cat’s health, and we even gave the kitten a bath, revealing his adorable charm. The heartwarming reunion between mother and kitten was filled with playfulness and bonding, showing the strength of family ties.
Here’s one example, regarding myself: I was working as a bouncer at a bar in Erie, Pa one night and some guy, about 24 years old or so was making quite a bit of trouble, harassing customers, pushing some, bullying others, etc.
He was somewhat high, but not drunk, and it seemed he was there just to harass and embarrass/humiliate some who were there with a date. He was pretty big, about 225 pounds and about 6 feet and acting like a real bully. When I was told about some guy doing these things ( He wasn’t near my door, but farther inside ), I went in to see what was up.
When I got there he was harassing some poor kid who was clearly scared and was with his girlfriend. As I approached, a few people pointed at this guy and said, “get him out if here, he’s an asshole.” .
I got up to him and very nicely told him to leave the kid alone and that he’d have to leave because he was causing too much trouble.
He looked at me, stood up as high as he could (I hate when they do that, like it matters), and said, “Who’s going to make me?” I said, simply, “me.”
He told me to get lost or he’d beat the shit out of me.
I said, “Well, let’s go outside and see who comes back in, and, if it’s you, you can stay.” He smiled, said,”I’m gonna enjoy this” and said, “let’s go” and we walked outside. By that time, everyone, including the other bouncer at my door knew what was going to happen.
The other bouncer, Tommy Williams, just stood at the door and smiled while we walked outside. Well, when we got out about 15 feet from the door, the moron suddenly turned and tried to hit me with a roundhouse kick which I not only blocked, but grabbed his leg and picked him up by the leg and threw him to the ground, saying, ”I don’t think karate is going to help you here.”
He jumped up and said, “how about this, asshole? and then tried a double leg takedown, as, apparently, at some time he was a wrestler. I actually laughed and said, “oh, you want to wrestle, huh?” and then as I countered his sad attempt, the other bouncer, who had heard everything, shouted out: “Wrestle? well you picked the right guy, he’s the National wrestling Champion……”
I just said, “You picked the wrong guy you moron,” and, as my friend, Tommy later said to me, I literally swept the parking lot with him.
I never saw him after two of his friends ended up taking either home or to the hospital.
He was a bully.
He got to feel like those he had bullied before.
I was NOT kind to him.
No regrets, but I bet he was kinda surprised when he heard the other bouncer tell him who I was, and he had no escape, as even as he said over and over, “I quit, I give up.”
I told him that it wasn’t up to him, It was my call and I wasn’t done yet.
That is a scary thing to realize, that you can’t quit, that it’s up to the guy beating the crap out of you. But I believe it has led others like that guy to never bully anyone again. Jeff
Sat in a bar in South Pattaya one Sunday afternoon in 1991 I noticed a fairly fit looking bloke dressed only in flip flops and shorts. He suddenly ordered everyone a drink then turned to me and said “I see my friend that you are interested in my tattoos.” I wasn’t that interested but I wasn’t going to argue and let him tell me. One he’d got for some work in the Philippines – the other some thing in the Mekong Delta. A mahout then came by with a large elephant which the man went across to look at saying they’d always fascinated him. So I asked him where he came from – American Samoa he replied. And what did he do? He worked “for the government”.
He then stepped back and ordered another drink for everyone in the bar. I thanked him and he turned and said “Let’s eat and drink for tomorrow we may be dead”. He then looked me in the eye with the coldest eyes I’d ever seen and said “ You know it is very easy. I pick up the gun, I pull the trigger and they are gone.” It was evident he wasn’t bullshitting.
That evening I saw the bar owner – who comes from Texas – and mentioned this guy. “Oh yes that’s so and so – he’s a US Navy SEAL. Bad news when he’s drunk.”
Guess I can be thankful I met him whilst he was sober!
Atheist Overdoses; Shown Soul’s Process Of Pre-Life Planning (NDE)
Her story is powerful. All of her words should have been heard and none bleeped out….
If you are offended by profanity, best skip this response.
I, too, am in the top 1% of wealth holders in this country, albeit, on lowest rung, yet minimum wage at my small Inn is higher than it is at this billionaire cunt’s company. I have no problem finding employees. This piece of shit motherfucker sits on his yacht sipping pina coladas while his employees need a second job to just pay the bills to live their day to day lives.
This asshole supports the Republican Party with massive amounts of money, and as a wealthy person, I can tell you a thing or two about how tax laws work in this country. For those of you who make less than $250k a year but still vote Republican, your economic misery is your own fault. The Democratic Party has LOTS of problems, but one problem they don’t have is trying to make life better for the average person and if you stopped watching your choice of right wing media, you’d soon realize that. It’s people like this cunt who are destroying America and contributing NOTHING to it.
What did this prick do? He built a fucking store, massively exploited his workforce by grabbing all the loot for himself and then whining when ordinary people have had enough and don’t want to work for anymore. Fuck him, and his fellow cunt billionaires.
When I was doing my B Tech, there was a Professor Talukedar who used to teach us ‘Mechanics’.
His lectures used to be very interesting since he had an interesting way to teach and explain the concepts.
One day, in the class, he asked the following questions,
What is ZERO.
What is INFINITY.
Can ZERO and INFINITY be same.
We all thought that we knew the answers and we replied as following,
ZERO means nothing
INFINITY means a number greater than any countable number
ZERO and INFINITY are opposite and they can never be same
He countered us by first talking about infinity and asked, ‘How can there be any number which is greater than any countable number?’
We had no answers.
He then explained the concept of infinity in a very interesting way, which I remember even after more than 35 years.
He said that imagine that there is an illiterate shepherd who can count only upto 20.
Now, if the number of sheep he has less than 20 and you ask him how many sheep he has, he can tell you the precise number (like 3, 5 14 etc.). However, if the number is more than 20, he is likely to say “TOO MANY”.
He then explained that in science infinity means ‘too many’ (and not uncountable) and in the same way zero means ‘too few’ (and not nothing)
As an example, he said that if we take the diameter of the Earth as compared to distance between Earth and Sun, the diameter of earth can be said to zero since it is too small.
However, when we compare the same diameter of earth with the size of a grain, diameter of earth can be said to be infinite.
Hence, he concluded that the same thing can be ZERO and INFINITE at the same time, depending on the context, or your matrix of comparison.
The relationship between richness and poverty is similar to the relationship between infinity and zero.
It all depends on the scale of comparison with your wants.
If your income is more than your wants, you are rich.
If your wants are more than your income, you are poor.
I consider myself rich because my wants are far lesser than my income.
I have become rich not so much by acquiring lots of money, but by progressively reducing my wants.
If you can reduce your wants, you too can become rich at this very moment.
I came home very sick with flu one day, went up to my bedroom, my husband was in my bed with the mail lady. I told them both to get the fuck out of my house. He argued that he needed sleep cuz he worked overnights. He needed his clothes and stuff. I told him all his clothes would be alongside the garage by Monday. It’s where the garbage is kept. Take a shirt and stuff he needed for tonight and get lost. Take a shower at her house or work. I packed up his stuff in garbage bags along with the topper to our wedding cake, some mementos from our honeymoon, I was being passive aggressive I agree, but how dare he sleep with her in our bed, in our home. We had a 2 year old and a 6 mos old. He was just wrong. He showed up a month later crying to me that she had broken up with him. I told him too bad, I didn’t feel bad for him in the least. I got the house( and mortgage) in the divorce. It was ok cuz I wanted the kids to stay in their home and school and I made more money, the root cause of the problem. He felt inadequate cuz I was a senior manager and he was doing maintenance work. This was no issue for me, just for him.
When I first got married, we would be passionate everywhere, if you know what I mean, bed, floor, couch, where ever. We would do things for each other. And we enjoyed each other’s company. She was from Japan I am white american.
I learned to speak Japanese and we lived in Japan a few years and life was good. We had kids together, but over the years things grew cold between us.
They say that people change and you grow apart. I don’t think either of us changed. I doubt that most people change. What I suspected happened was that I would base my love on how much she loved me and visa versa. If she did something nice for me, I would do something nice for her. Or if I did something nice for her, she would do something nice for me.
That all sounds fine and dandy, but I think in practice, it doesn’t work. When I do something nice for her, I expect something of equal niceness in return. However, often is the case that you don’t perceive what is done in return is as valuable as what you gave him or her. So the next time you do something, you feel less inclined to do something as nice. And so the love kind of fizzles.
You basically stop caring because you perceive your partner as not caring. And chances are your partner feels the same way about you. Neither person has changed. They are both the same person, but the love isn’t there anymore. They let it spiral into nothingness.
That is what my wife and I did. After 20 some odd years of marriage, there was nothing. I really had no desire to do anything for my wife, because she wasn’t going to do anything for me. We didn’t hate each other. We helped each other when needed, but that is about all.
I was unhappy with the marriage. I either wanted out or I wanted it fixed. But after 20 years of marriage, I knew that she wasn’t going to try and fix the marriage. I knew that she thought I would not change so why should she have to do anything special and if I did change, it would only be temporary and things would go back to how they were, so why even try. I knew this would be her mind set.
So I had 3 options. Divorce, stay in the lifeless, sexless marriage, or take a chance and do something about it.
I thought perhaps divorce would be the better way. Start anew. She had given up on me and didn’t care.
But I decided to give it a try anyway. I completely revamped my approach. I decided that I would try for one year to fix this. I would not require her to do anything. I would just do these things on my own. If these things wooed her back then she would be back on her own terms and not mine.
So I did the following.
I committed to get into shape… better diet, exercise
I committed to do something special for her everyday regardless of whether we were getting along or not.
I committed to do at least an additional 30 minutes of house work every day.
I committed to pay her a sincere compliment at least once per day.
I committed not to fight with her and to only have calm arguments with her.
I decided to fix her dinner and breakfast as often as possible.
In essence I decided to love her every day.
As I thought, I got essentially no response from her day after day. I mean she would sometimes say thank you, but that was about it. After about four months she started to change. I kept at it. She continued to change. Ok.. she didn’t change. She was the same person, but she saw that I was trying. She saw that she was important to me. She saw that I wasn’t giving up. She wanted to be loved.
She started doing things for me again. We started talking a lot more and doing a lot more together. We started dating again and going on trips. It was almost like we were newly weds again, but with less passion, but it felt great. Sometimes I would just hold her in my arms for 30 minutes.
Love can be revived. It is not easy. True love takes work. Making the decision above to love her regardless was the second best decision of my life. The first of course was to marry her. Our marriage is not perfect, but I look forward to seeing her every day. She is an awesome woman. She is basically the same person I married. We just let our love die. We were lazy lovers. She asked me one day what got into me and I talked with her about my plan. I think it was a pretty good plan and so did she. And yes, we are still married, but much more happily now.
I knew our love couldn’t be one sided, but I also knew it needed to start somewhere and why not me. Ask yourself, why not you? Do you want the love back? what kind of sacrifice are you willing to make to have the love back? If I had decided that she needed to do something while I was doing something, then we would have been right back to where we started. You can’t base your actions on what the other is doing in return. You need to commit to love regardless of what is done in return. That is the sacrifice and that is where real love will begin.
Edit.
I can’t believe how many people have read and liked this. Someone mentioned the 40 day challenge. I found out about that several months after I started on this path. There is a movie out there along these same lines called fireproof that is worth a watch.
For me things didn’t change around in 40 days. It took quite a bit longer. But you have to ask yourself is divorce really the better way out? Yes, sometimes it is. But infidelity doesn’t have to be the end of life as we know it.
I look back on these events and they seem like a distant memory, the hurt and pain. like a forgotten dream. But it really wasn’t that long ago. I am a better person because of it. She has become a better person as well and we are definitely a better couple.
6 REASONS WHY AMERICANS ARE OBESE. WHAT IS CAUSING THE RISING OBESITY IN THE USA?
It’s no secret that obesity in America has been an ongoing issue and that doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon.
In fact, according to Harvard University; about 2 in every 3 adults or 69 percent of the population in the US are overweight while1 in 3 adults are obese or 39 percent.
It has to make you wonder how the most powerful and advanced nation in the world can be so obese especially when compared to countries in Europe and Asia, it’s not like we don’t have the means as a nation for healthier lifestyle and better-quality food.
Or maybe Americans are meant to be obese, and they want us to stay that way? Sounds controversial right, well in this video we will expose 8 reasons why Americans are so obese compared to other countries.
Our country born with troubles since its independence.
Have you ever heard about the Burma Campaign in World War 2? It is quite thorough and one of the most destructive campaigns largely forgotten by Western Powers and historians. The entire infrastructure of the country was destroyed during the course of the war. By the end of the war, the country was totally in rubbles and a massive number of firearms were widespread even in the village level which was left behind by warring powers. The situation was ripe for armed insurgencies.
The country was never been administered as a whole before British arrival. The region out of central Myanmar was usually administered by local petty chiefs with vassal-high king relationship which never need any direct contact between different cultures (except a few tributary missions and merchants). There is no large-scale internal trade and the transportation was also difficult. Different cultures and ethnic groups suddenly came into contact under British rule. As usual, the British exploited the situation by creating a divide & conquer strategy by favouring ethnic minorities over the Burmese majority. This led to extreme Burmese nationalism.
Due to economic disaster in the 1930s and later devastating war, the country is under very hard economic conditions which was a natural breeding ground for communism. The Burmese Communist Party which never believed in British plan for independence already went rebellion even before independence.
Then, the world’s longest-running civil war began.
In the 1950s and 60s, the civil war lost momentum and Burma came under the spotlight of international relations due to its leading role in third world nations, one of the founders of the non-aligned movement. The country was also the only real democratic nation in Southeast Asia with regular elections. The country largely recovered from the war at the beginning of the 1960s and hopes ran high. A federal system was proposed by the ethnic leaders and the government agreed.
All out of sudden, the coup came. At first, people weren’t serious as they already seen a short 2 years long military rule which stabilized the country and the coup ended with the mostly free and fair elections. By the time they realized that the military is no longer intended to give up the power this time, the civil war gained intensity and all the things we achieved in the last 10 years were gone.
The military junta slowly transformed themselves into businessmen by laying hands on the country’s economy entirely. The Myanmar Economic Corporation (MEC) ran by the military alone control nearly 40–50% of the country’s economy directly or indirectly. With the lack of a proper banking system, the ordinary people have no access to much-needed capital for investments. Small and Medium scale businesses have no chance to grow unless the monopoly of military elites and their relatives were removed.
So he responds in self-defense and you teach him that if the attacker is female he’s supposed to just sit there writhing in pain getting injured? And she got off scott-free?
What’s next? She stabs him and he gets tossed in a closet and fed gruel and water? Because you might as well.
If you knew she attacked first, you should have punished HER. You discipline all parties that have transgressed, not just the ones who have a penis. Having a vagina doesn’t magically bestow immunity on a person.
If you confiscated all his devices, you should have confiscated hers as well. For his month of grounding, she should have received two.
There’s a big difference between a slap in the face (which stings but quickly dissapates) and kicking someone in the jewelies (which could cause irreparable damage).
No. You’re punishment wasn’t good enough. You half-assed it due to sexist reasoning. Go back and discipline your daughter as well.
Who Wants To Be A WARMONGER?!
Inspired by the war hawks that run the West, it’s the game show that always ends badly!
Even though this was a relatively small thing, it affected me profoundly.
On my lunch break from work, I went to a fast food place. A homeless man came in. He was absolutely filthy, with long, greasy hair and dirty hands, dressed in raggedy clothes with a piece of blanket wrapped around him. He smelled bad. He didn’t seem able to talk and he went from table to table, sort of chittering at people, like a rat. People were pretty horrified and either gave him a quarter or just ignored him.
There was one table with 4 Mexican day laborers. These are guys who often are in the U.S. “illegally” and who hang around outside home improvement stores, hoping to pick up jobs. They don’t make much money and sometimes people cheat them, knowing the laborers can’t go to the authorities. A lot of these men may live in one house so they can save money and send it back to their families in Mexico.
When this homeless man came up to their table, they asked him, “Are you hungry? Do you want something to eat?” Then they gave him all of their food, packing it up for him so he could carry it away. Then they didn’t go and buy more food themselves (they probably couldn’t afford it), but simply cleared the table and walked out. They knew what it was to suffer, and they very likely would suffer a bit from their generosity. But that didn’t stop them; and they were the best example of kindness I have ever seen. It was over 30 years ago, and it still affects me.
The night my daughter died in a double hit-and-run in Colorado, a stranger stopped to help her and was witness to the second car that hit her, ending her life. He had been trying to help her though; he called for an ambulance and although it was ultimately unsuccessful, every effort was made to save her life. That stranger is a hero as far as I’m concerned.
The man who tried to help was very traumatized by what he had witnessed and had to change jobs so that he no longer had to daily pass by the place where my daughter died as he went to and from work. Unrelated to the accident, he and his wife got rid of their landline when they moved. I wanted very much to thank him but although I had tried every way I knew, his job had changed, he no longer had a telephone I could call 411 for and he no longer lived in the same place. I finally decided that simply being grateful would have to be enough, even if I couldn’t tell him myself.
Two years later, I’m sitting at the dinner table in a hostel in London and strike up a conversation with a guy also having dinner there. He was from the same area as me. He remembered my daughter’s death not just from it being in the news, but because the husband of one of his co-workers had stopped and tried to help the young lady.
OMG.
To make a long story short, he put me in touch with his co-worker and I was able to email her and express my thanks and gratitude for her husband’s efforts that night. She emailed me back and said that although her husband was desperately sorry he couldn’t save her, he was grateful that she didn’t have to die alone. He is a hero in my eyes and I’m so glad I got to let him know how grateful our family is. May he and his loved ones be abundantly blessed.
China Reveals HUGE Sanctions On US Tech Giants Due A STAGGERING Unpaid $1 Trillion
The direct consequences for the implicated U.S. tech companies are potentially disastrous. China is a significant market for many of these entities, and the sanctions could drastically affect their revenue, stock prices, and global operations. Companies like Apple, which rely on China for both sales and a vast portion of their supply chain, could see significant disruptions. The same goes for firms like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, which have invested billions in capturing the Chinese market and establishing a supply chain nexus.
Furthermore, these sanctions could also impact hundreds of smaller U.S. tech firms and startups that might not be direct targets but could suffer collateral damage due to the intertwined nature of the tech ecosystem. This isn’t just a bilateral U.S.-China issue; the sanctions have ramifications for the global tech industry. Supply chains across the world are intricately linked, and disruptions in China could lead to ripple effects impacting tech manufacturing globally. Countries and businesses that rely on these tech giants for critical infrastructure, software, and hardware might find themselves caught in the crossfire.
The European Union, India, Japan, and South Korea, among others, will be closely watching the developments. Any prolonged conflict could force these nations to recalibrate their tech dependencies and alliances. On the diplomatic front, this escalation further strains an already tense U.S.-China relationship. The last few years have witnessed a hardening of stances on both sides, with trade wars, tech bans, and territorial disputes. This new development might just push the diplomatic ties to a new low.
As the news of China’s unprecedented sanctions reverberated across the globe, key stakeholders began weighing in, highlighting the vast complexities of the issue. Major international business councils, traditionally silent on political matters, expressed deep concern over the possible long-term disruptions to global trade. Wall Street responded predictably, with significant declines in tech stock prices. Investor sentiments seem to mirror the broader fears. If China and the U.S., two of the world’s largest economies, can’t resolve their differences amicably, what hope is there for the stability of the global economic order?
Moreover, experts in international relations also sounded the alarm. The escalation of this magnitude in the U.S.-China tech conflict marks a deviation from conventional trade disagreements. The integration of geopolitics with business is not new, but the scale of this rift indicates a deep-seated power struggle reflecting ambitions, fears, and strategies beyond mere economic interests.
One of the most pressing concerns for the sanctioned tech companies and the international community is the verification of China’s claim. How is this enormous one trillion dollars figure reached without transparent documentation and a clear breakdown? Suspicions linger over the validity of such a vast sum. The call for a neutral third-party audit has gained traction in various quarters. International bodies like the World Trade Organization could potentially mediate, ensuring that claims and counterclaims are examined impartially.
While the U.S. government has not yet announced any countermeasures, there’s widespread speculation about potential retaliation. Would the U.S. respond with equivalent sanctions on Chinese tech companies? Could there be a broader economic response that targets other sectors of the Chinese economy? Such a move would undoubtedly lead to further escalation, intensifying the trade war and potentially causing harm to global economic stability.
As an immigrant, one thing that always spooks me is paperwork and all related things to immigration process.
One day, I was outside working on my garden, when I came back inside, there were four missed calls. Just like a habit, I copied and pasted the phone number to Google search, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection – Corpus Christi Border Patrol Station popped up.
I started panicking. Why? Why they called me?!?? So, when the phone number appeared again a few minutes after that, I picked it up.
A woman on the phone let me know that there was someone used my identity to cross the border, tried to traffic drugs into the country. She told me that this could happen because I traveled outside of the country recently (which was correct). I was nervous. Then the woman proceeded to tell me she ‘would help me to verify and straighten things up’. Then she asked me my full name, DoB and Social Number.
At this point, I started smelling B.S. I told her, wasn’t it an identity thief case? Shouldn’t she have those information already? She got furious and told me, she was ‘trying to help’ and I needed to ‘cooperate’ or else I would ‘end up in jail’.
I decided to cut off the call, told her I would contact my lawyer and said goodbye then hung up.
I did some searching, then I decided to call back the phone number. It went to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection – Corpus Christi Border Patrol Station for real. I talked to an officer. He told me I was right hanging up the call and told me scammers nowadays gets really aggressive. They can hi-jack the phone number line like that, so the Caller ID looks like it’s legitimate from government offices. He also told me: If the government wants anything from you, they will send snail mails, they don’t call.
I travel full-time via my FJ Cruiser and my RV. A year or two ago, I met a guy who turned out to be a federal agent. No, I was not being investigated, at least not for business/national security reasons.
Before finalizing our first date, he casually mentioned that he had run the front plate on my FJ Cruiser, which absolutely horrified me. This isn’t some random guy using Google. This is a federal agent!
It was also the way he said it. As if it was the most normal thing in the world to invade someone’s (especially a woman traveling solo!) privacy in that way.
After he told me he ran my plates, I just stopped responding. I mean, next thing I know, he could be checking my IP address or something and figuring out where I was camping alone that night.
It was creepy.
So a week goes by and he blasts me for ghosting him. I respond, “Are you seriously asking me why? Dude, you RAN MY PLATES!”
Instead of apologizing or acknowledging that that was kinda creepy, he proceeded to tell me that I was “asking for it” by sharing a picture of my rig. He told me the fact that I had a custom plate intrigued him, so it was 100% my fault for dangling the carrot (a custom plate) in front of his face.
I blocked him after that. As far as I know, I’m not currently being stalked by any federal agents. But who really knows? The feds are pretty crafty.
Swiss Bliss
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
1 tablespoon butter
1 (2 pound) chuck roast, cut 1 inch thick
1 envelope onion soup mix
1 (4 ounce) can mushrooms, drained
1/2 medium green bell pepper, sliced
1 (20 ounce) can tomatoes, drained and chopped, reserving juice
Salt and pepper, to taste
1 tablespoon A-1 steak sauce
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1 tablespoon parsley flakes
Instructions
Coat center of large sheet of heavy foil with butter and place into a 13 x 9 inch dish.
Place meat across foil, overlapping each piece slightly.
Sprinkle with soup mix, mushrooms, green pepper slices and tomatoes.
Sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper.
Mix tomato juice, steak sauce and cornstarch.
Add enough water to make 2 cups liquid.
Pour over meat mixture and sprinkle with parsley flakes.
Cover with foil and bake at 375 degrees F for 2 hours.
I had a black client who had been arrested in his house and white cops slammed his head into a dresser drawer just for fun, as witnessed by several officers in the house. As the dresser was pushed against a casement window on the front of the house, slamming his head into the dresser “blew” the window into the front yard with a shotgun-like explosion, witnessed by all the neighbors watching the police action from across the street. The black jailer saw the bruise on the client’s forehead when taking the mugshot.
On the motion to dismiss for unreasonable police violence, all the cops lied and denied slamming the client’s head against the dresser. The judge and prosecutor acted as if the cops were not lying and the window blew itself into the yard.
It was late afternoon and the only civilians in the courtroom was a fifth-grade civics class of 20 kids aged 10–11 years and their teacher. The judge had a reputation as a racist and a hard-ass.
I turned during argument on the (hopeless) motion to the kids and asked the courtroom rhetorically: “Why in the world would police officers take the witness stand, swear on the Bible to tell the truth, and then lie?” Then I said, “Well, it makes winning their case a lot easier, and no one in authority stops them, and the officers know this.”
So I was accusing the judge of “letting” the officers lie to win the motion. That is, the judge OFTEN knows officers are lying and so does the prosecutor, but they don’t stop it. The officers know this, so they lie. Not all and not always, but in cases like this, they all lied together.
The judge got really pissed and started haranguing me, so I stoked his anger higher. The prosecutor could see how bad all this was starting to look to the appellate judges in any appeal and hung his head in defeat. My client walked out of the courtroom with a very sweet deal from the prosecutor to cut his losses.
TikTok on the cost of living | RANT ON INFLATION | EVERYONE IS BROKE AND TIRED
Hi guys, just to clarify I do not own any of these videos I just thought it would be interesting to see how people are dealing with the cost of living, sending prayers and well wishes to you.
When I was a kid, hot dogs were lame flavorless picnic fodder that got a squirt of mustard and ketchup and onions if you were daring, nothing more.
One summer a diner opened near me that specialized in char broiled burgers and Chicago dogs. I’d never heard of a Chicago dog before, so naturally I had to try one. Man, what a life changing experience.
It was a snappy Sabrett dog topped with mustard, sweet neon green pickle relish, diced onions, spicy sport peppers, tomato slices and a wedge of dill pickle. Every bite was overflowing with crunchy, spicy, sweet, sour, salty and savory goodness. In my 15 years of life it was literally one of the best things I had ever eaten. I still love them today.
More than just a poem, the Chicago dog contains a lesson: ketchup doesn’t belong on a hot dog.
It was brought to my attention that a true Chicago dog is made from Vienna Beef brand hot dogs and always includes celery salt. I’m down with both of those, so that’s what a true Chicago dog should be made with.
There are many American assets in China, estimated to be worth 2.2 trillion.
The US companies that own these assets are not going to be happy with the US government if China were to freeze these assets.
Do you think that the US companies owners and employees will vote for Biden next year if China freezes their assets in response to the US freezing Chinese assets?
The old trick is repeated! Biden attempts to arrest Huawei executives with criminal charges!
The US foreign policy from 1948 to 1991 was centred around INTERNATIONAL LAW
Diplomats, Army, Businessmen, Politicians worked as per INTERNATIONAL LAW and relied on their entire foreign policy from a derived paper from 1955 called ‘Peace during the Cold War’, penned right after the Korean War
It taught a formula for maintaining peace and coexistence of different nations with different ideologies
The core objectives of this ideology was :-
Strive for Peace always
No War Or conflict with Nuclear Nations
Preserving Human Spirits & Freedom
Ensuring Capitalism and Free Trade flow between allies
Economic Cooperation
Preserve and not endanger the Security of the United States and it’s allies
Diplomats like McNamara, Kissinger, Baker etc were steeped in this doctrine and founded this doctrine
Kennedy, Nixon, Bush Sr and Reagan followed this core ideology
It was a healthy doctrine
Barring a 7 year aberration with the Vietnam War (1968–1975).
Thus James Baker easily promised not to expand eastwards
He wanted a peaceful handshake with the Russians
Post 1991, a new paper was published which reflected a NEW IDEOLOGY infecting the Americans
A POST COLD WAR ORDER
That was it’s early name
INTERNATIONAL LAW quickly changed into what we know today as the INTERNATIONAL RULES BASED ORDER
The core of objectives of this ideology were :-
The US has to lead the world into a permanent peace after the Cold War
The US must stop the rise of any nation that could lead the world into another cold war
The US must bring peace to Europe, the Middle East and Asia even at the cost of strategies that could heavily curtail freedom of thought and independence in those nations
The US must always maintain a lead in arms and troops and military power for the betterment of the whole world
Russia for its own people’s sake needed to be broken down further and controlled by the Rules based order to prevent it slipping back into anarchy and chaos
The Middle East and Europe had to be controlled by the USA for their own security and security of energy in the world
This slowly became the leading ideology in USA with all diplomats born in 1966 or later (who are 57 years old or younger today) being steeped in this ideology and thought
This was also called
WDC as coined by Madeleine Albright – WEAKEN, DEMOCRATIZE, CONTROL
Many Politicians, then in their 40s and early 50s endorsed this philosophy openly including Mitch McConnell, Joe Biden, Hilary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Al Gore etc
The US Ideology back then never considered Africa or China as serious
This was the birth of the NEOCON ideology
Bush Sr, Rice, Albright, Kagan, Nuland, Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Ned Price, John Kirby, John Kerry, Mitt Romney, Joe Biden have all been steeped with this Neocon Ideology or International Rules Based Order Ideology
A Core part of this ideology is to bring peace to Europe by controlling Europe & to break down and weaken Russia
To do this NATO had to keep expanding
A Dramatic turnaround from the Old Ideology of INTERNATIONAL LAW
Today this is the leading ideology but since this ideology doesn’t mention China or Africa or India or how to handle a tougher Putin, the Americans are clueless on how to continue
Unless a new ideology for peaceful coexistence again develops , endorsed by 40–45 year old politicians and diplomats born on or after 1998 or Political Science Students born on or after 2006
The US will slowly sink due to this Neocon policy
Note most of the political ideologues of these thoughts are 65–70 years old at the very least
The Ideology changed, thus NATO kept expanding
That’s the Ideology that drives the US today
Others who are steeped in this Ideology include :- Boris Johnson, Keir Starmer, Kishida and our favorite JUSTIN TRUDEAU
In 2009 I was diagnosed with glioblastoma, a grade 4 brain cancer, after surgery the oncologist came back with the sad news that the statistics look quite ugly, he gave me treatments for 9 months, and 6 months to one year to live.
I was engaged preparing to marry in few months. We broke up, I didn’t see why I would leave a widow behind and break her heart.
I had no desire to pursue anything further in life…
It was a time of complete shutdown.
I wanted to quit my job, however my managers managed to convince me to stay with a relaxed schedule…
They started to teach me statistics again.
An average of 1 year, means some people die in 3 years, while others die in 6 months, and that I should have the positivity to assume I’m on the long term survival side.
By continuing to go to work, I kept myself busy, not thinking too much about my cancer.. I travelled , did some of the stuff I always wanted to do, visited places I always wanted to go.
I started to revisit my friends, hang out with those I really liked, got rid of those who made me feel sad, or felt pity. There are those who just don’t know what to tell you, then it gets awkward…
It is not something you want to talk about with everyone. You want to feel good, and not be down all the time.
I started to be more of a minimalist.. I had no desire in all the nice stuff I had always dreamt of, as My life seemed to come to a stop
However over time.. I started to realize that I’m happier .. I had special concerns for my parents, I started spending more time with my parents. With my family They are the joy of my life.. Too sad I never realized that earlier
8 years later I’m still around, although the cancer hit back several times, and my left side is now paralyzed, I’m still active going to work, participating in charities, trying to keep myself busy and active.
I was 32 when I was diagnosed, now hitting the 40’s I feel more mature, I’m guessing age is an important factor in how we take such news.
After all life goes on, and it is how you take the news that makes all the difference..
Keep busy, don’t let your mind wander too much.. No one knows when you are going to die..
There’s a shock at the beginning, try to pass it, embrace the news and you will feel the tranquility after a while..
My key messages would be:
no one knows when you are going to die, all doctors have are statistics.
Happiness is in the small and little things.. Time with family, reading a good book, listening to nice music, enjoying a movie.. Spending time on the beach, watching a sunset, nature, forest , a bird…
Through charity work I started to appreciate what I have, there are sooo many underprivileged people who would dream of what we take as granted, running water, electricity, food,medicine, family.
Each night I count at least 10 things I’m grateful for in my life.
I also started to keep a journal of the things that make me really happy and doing more of that.
Lavrov: “If the West want war, they can have it. If you insist, let’s decide it on the battlefield.”
God bless Russia and Mr Putin and mr lavrov… The Russians have the balls to tell the truth.. unlike the English and the yanks.
Originally Answered: What exactly is a midlife crisis? And how common are they ?
I can only speak from my experience, but here’s a personal account of my own midlife crisis. I was about 34 and I had a strong and relentless urge to pursue an unrealized goal that had been bothering me for quite a while, in fact, over 10 years.
Long ago, I had wanted to pursue nursing school, and due to circumstances such as an abusive ex-husband who prevented me from studies, I was not able to do so. When I finally escaped that decade-long relationship, it took a while for me to get back on my feet as I had to start from scratch to build my finances, portfolio, and confidence up. Time passes, I remarry and have a child and although things are great with my career and family, the thought of nursing kept nagging me at the back of my mind. I got increasingly upset at myself that I had let so many years pass and wondered when would be the time for me to do what I originally wanted to do.
So in my mid-thirties I made the decision to apply to nursing school, quickly took all the prerequisites and I got in a few months later, even though it was extremely competitive. I had to scale back on my other jobs and my schedule became MUCH more complicated. My social life definitely dwindled to nothing! Most people would ask, why are you going back to school? Don’t you like being a photographer and music teacher? Yes, yes I completely love my jobs. But I also want to be a nurse, and I will forever think “what if” if I do not pursue this.
Nursing school is demanding, and there is so much material to know that is compressed in such a short time frame. A typical day would be: wake up at 530am for hospital shift from 7am–3pm, study/edit until family arrives home, feed/play/bathe toddler and put toddler to bed, study/edit until midnight. Rinse and repeat. There were times I felt overwhelmed and perhaps I bit off more than I could chew. The amount of textbooks and notes I have from my studies, stacked on top of each other towers over me! However, I feel the most alive when I am caring for patients, and when they thank me heartily for the care I’ve given to them, my heart swells and that is the best feeling in the world. Therefore, my midlife crisis was a catalyst for me to take a leap and reach for my goal of becoming a nurse.
I can tell the experience of a friend. who married a woman who was multi-millionaire since birth. Saying that they were rich is an understatement. They only flew first or business class, he got a new Porsche or Mercedes every single year and they always lived in the best areas in Manhattan,
I remember when he and his wife moved to New York they hired an interior designer from Milan to do the decoration. They spent around a million dollars only with the renovation and furniture for the apartment.
They had it all, and not even in my dreams I would imagine that one day they would lose it all.
However, like many other stories, they didn’t lose it overnight, but little by little.
I never imagined they would lose all their money because apart of being filthy rich, they were really lucky.
My friend’s wife grew up being a millionaire. Annual trips to Aspen with her family, then summer in Europe and everything we imagine rich people do. I was lucky to enjoy some of these perks when I was invited to one of their vacation homes.
They had a lot of money but they didn’t work. After all, they never needed to do it. She received a monthly allowance from her family that I believe was around 700K to 1M per year so they would probably not bother to work 9 to 6 to make $100K more.
They lived this life for around 10 years. Then, they had some disagreement with their family and they stopped receiving the allowance. They lived by their savings for around 3 years. During those years they lived a very good life, but not so lavish as before. After 3 years, when they were about to start selling everything so they could have some money, her uncle died. He didn’t have any kids so she received a good sum of money that was sufficient for around 3 more years.
When their bank accounts were about to run dry again her mother passed away and she inherited, along with her brothers, around 4M each.
For most people, it would be sufficient for a lifetime, but they made very bad investments along with some poor decisions and I don’t know how, but they ended up losing everything in around 3 more years.
After losing all their money they started living with the money of a trust her parents left to her, Something around 5K per month. But they are on their 50s, they never worked and have no professional skills and they have to pay rent (as they don’t have a home), pay all their bills and above all, health insurance with that amount.
I saw them around 6 months ago and they were miserable. My friend developed a neurological disease due to the stress he endured in the last years. His wife was making all decisions as he wasn’t able to do it anymore. Unfortunately, he is so sick that he couldn’t work even if he wanted to.
I was really sad it happened to them because they were really nice people, It’s easy to judge them for never bothered to have a job or be wiser with their money, however, she was born in a different universe for most of us. What we see as a lavish lifestyle she sees as a regular day since birth.
I asked them if they needed anything and obviously what they need is their old lifestyle back. They moved to a modest apartment in a different state.
She told me that the biggest issue is that they don’t know how to live like that. She can’t imagine what’s like to do their own grocery shopping, and worst than that, go to Walmart with a shopping list. She said that if she spent a little more on things she like she might not have money for the supermarket next week.
I would not dare to say that this experience was humbling to them because they were always nice people, the difference is that they were nice people with lots of money. The only positive thing I believe this experience brought to them is that they are no longer superficial. They used to see everything like poverty, sorrow, and problems from a different perspective, and I used to see them through a mask that looked like they were using all the time
Now, for the first time, I was able to see who they really are. What are their emotions, their fears, their desires, and their regrets… For the first time in their lives they desire things, they no longer pull their credit card and immediately satisfy their desires and in that sense, they look like real people for me.
Every time I visited them over the years I always invited them for lunch, breakfast or coffee and even though I’m not wealthy I always offered to pay, and 6 months ago, when I saw them for the last time, I invited them to have a coffee at Starbucks and that was the first time in more than 15 years that they said thank you after I offered to pay for our breakfast.
It felt different. They don’t need to thank me for anything because during their life, just by inviting me to stay with them, they offered me much more than anything I’ve ever offered to them, but for the first time in their lives, they are learning to value every small good thing that life gives to them.
Thank you all for the upvotes and feedbacks to this story. In fact, I had two stories about the theme but Quora doesn’t allow to publish two answers for the same question, so, for those who are interested I’ll post the second story here.
In 2007 I was hired by a medium size tech company. The company had around 150 employees and they were growing fast. When I was hired they told me they would be moving to better offices in two months and they really did it. The new office was really impressive. Huge, very modern to the point it made the cover of a magazine.
My boss and her husband were the owners of the company. They were simply amazing. She was sweet, very polite and it was a pleasure to work for them. They were also very rich. In fact, she was so down to earth that it took me two months to realize that she was one of the owners of the company. It happened one day that we had a meeting with a client and she told me if I was OK to be squeezed on the back seat of her car, as another person was coming with us. I Imagined that she had one of those very small cars, but she showed up on a brand new convertible Porsche .
Little by little, we became acquainted. They invited me to have dinner one night and I was impressed by how rich they really were, They lived on a mansion, the land was so big that they had a tennis court, swimming pool and a stable with 5 horses on their land. He also was a motor enthusiast and had 9 cars. They owned a farm and a beach house in another city, even though we lived in one of the most beautiful beach cities in the world.
They made money fast because I was hired in 2007 and the company was founded in 2002 and it looked like they had a good lifestyle for some years.
They were amazing people, very humble, very calm and you would never say they had so much money just by talking to them.
I left the company by the end of 2007 because I received an offer to work in another place. I talked to them before accepting the offer, I explained my reasons and they were really supportive and told me that if I changed my mind the doors would be open.
By the end of 2008, a former colleague contacted me asking for a reference as he was leaving the company. I asked why he was leaving the company and the told me that the company had gone into receivership. Basically, they were impacted by the GFC.
They were so rich that I imagined that although the company had bankrupted they probably had a lot of savings.
I never heard from them again until 2017.
I had a health issue and I needed to see a specialist. When I got to the doctor, I was talking to the receptionist when I saw a sign with her name over her desk. (Let’s say Jennifer Parker – I’ll omit her real name). So I said to her. Hey Jennifer, what a coincidence, I had a boss with exactly the same name.
Then she told me that she was not Jennifer, that Jennifer was the other receptionist, that she worked Monday and Tuesday and Jenniffer Wednesday to Friday. I saw the doctor and two weeks later I came back for my return and when I arrived who I see working as a receptionist there? My former boss.
When she saw me she recognized me and told me that the other receptionist told what happened and when she saw my name she connected the dots.
She told me what happened to the company, basically was a problem with the contracts they made and as they weren’t able to get a new loan from the bank they could no longer keep the company and pay their debts. With that, they lost everything, not only the company but literally everything.
Their kids moved from private to public schools, they had all their cars, properties and assets confiscated and ended moving to a small apartment near the city. Her husband was able to get a new job (at nearly 60 years of age) and she had to go back to work to complement their income.
It was a huge surprise for me because you always expect that these things will happen to bad people, but never to nice people like them. They were honest, decent, hardworking, family oriented, and everybody in the office liked them.
Coincidentally I bumped into them again 3 months later in the mall. What surprised me the most is that they were able to go from a very rich to a very modest lifestyle without changing who they were. We sit together to have lunch in the food court and they were living like that was the life they always had. They were exactly the same people I met 10 years before, they were happy, making jokes with their kids (that were teenagers by then) and even when she told me what happened she didn’t do it with sadness.
I don’t know how they managed everything so well. Going through an experience like that could be very damaging, but it looks like they had a way to cope with everything.
It taught me a lesson that money can’t be trusted, life can be full of unexpected events with many things out of our control.
Starlink, a satellite constellation operated by aerospace company SpaceX, lost 212 satellites in the period spanning July 18th and September 18th, data compiled by satellitemap.space shows.
Data shows the number of burned-up satellites steadily increasing over the past three years, but a significant spike can be observed starting the month of July.
It’s unclear whether these satellites were scheduled to de-orbit or whether the burn-ups were a result of a failure. Cybernewshas reached out to SpaceX for comment but has not received a response.
Some experts questioned the accuracy of numbers posted on the tracker website, saying they appeared to be unusually high. According to satellitemap.space, its data is based on public tracking information published on space-track and elsewhere.
Starlink satellites are designed to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere at the end of their life cycle, which is approximately five years.
SpaceX started launching Starlink satellites in 2019. Over 5,000 have been sent into Earth’s lower orbit since then. Of those, about 4,500 are believed to be active.
Satellites can also be vulnerable to electromagnetic storms, with strong solar flares recorded this summer as the sun enters a period of heightened activity.
Destructive solar events have affected Starlink before. In February last year, SpaceX said it lost 40 new satellites shortly after launch because of an electromagnetic storm. When accounting for the rocket launch, it potentially cost the company about $100 million in damages.
Steak with Gorgonzola Thyme Crust
Yield: 2 servings
Ingredients
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
2 (6 ounce) beef tenderloin or small rib eye steaks, cut 3/4 inch thick
1 large or 2 small cloves garlic, minced
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme or 1/2 teaspoon dried
1/2 cup (2 ounces) crumbled Wisconsin Gorgonzola cheese
Instructions
Heat broiler.
Spoon Worcestershire sauce over both sides of steaks; let stand for 5 minutes.
Sprinkle garlic and pepper over steaks. Place steaks on rack of broiler pan.
Broil 3 to 4 inches from heat source for 3 to 4 minutes per side for medium rare steak.
Remove pan from broiler. Sprinkle thyme, then cheese over steaks.
Return to oven and broil for 2 minutes or until cheese is golden brown.
China is Sending Armored Vehicles To Mali Africa ! U.S PANIC
Nations like Mali have been overlooked in international forums, but as China’s prominence rises, Mali has found a key ally. This video explores China’s involvement in Mali’s development and security, delving into the intricate dynamics of China’s relationship with Africa and its potential implications for the global stage.
Back in 1983, I needed an upscale cocktail dress for a cosmetic industry function. I found a delightful $1200 silk dress marked down 50% to $600. It has a tiny rip by the zipper that I could repair but it was still way over my budget. (I was a very junior marketing person at the time, so not earning great.)
I asked the sales clerk if they do better on the price due to the rip and she agreed to take another 50% off bringing it to $300. She retickets it over the original ticket and the 1st sale ticket. Still more than I could truly afford but I decided to buy it anyway.
I go to the cashier to pay and she asked me if it came off the 50% sale rack. When I said it was, she says it is 50% off and rings $150 into the register, instead of the $300, even though it had multiple sales tickets on it. Lucky me, I’m thinking.
But before I can pay, she notices the small rip and says she will deduct an extra $50 which now brings it to $100. I happily paid and left the store ASAP, just in case. Lol
And I received many compliments for my dress at the event.
Walking into a McDonald’s one morning a young couple pretty dirty living rough approached me. The young man probably mid twenties asked if I could buy his girlfriend a egg McMuffin because they only had a handful of change not enough for the sandwich. So I asked them to come to the counter with me and asked them what on the board they would eat. The young man’s eyes went wide. Told me they had not eaten in three days. I said you can have whatever you like. The both asked for the big breakfast and a juice and a milk. I told them maybe they should order the sandwich she wanted as well. they were extremely happy they thanked me. They went and sat outside ate their meals cleaned up and moved on. Maybe they don’t even remember the event in their lives. But I was satisfied that I and spent my money wisely and am still left with a good memory of a McDonald’s breakfast when I was heading to get a seniors coffee.
PLOT: Desperate to gain the affection of a beautiful co-worker, Elliot (Brendan Fraser) strikes a deal with the Devil (Elizabeth Hurley) — a drop dead gorgeous woman with a wicked sense of humor. In exchange for Elliot’s soul, she will grant him 7 wishes. But with each wish, he gets more than he asked for.
If you take a moment to look at the globe, you will notice that the United States (and remember they OWN both Ukraine, and Israel) started wars in Ukraine, and in Israel (After all, HAMAS is Western trained).
Why?
Well, for one, war is a business racket. But that is not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the BRI.
Both wars effectively block two major routes of the BRI to the West.
War in Ukraine = Europe BRI
War around Israel = African BRI
Thus the BRI is now geographically limited to the Asian nations.
The Asian Games in Hangzhou, which kicked off on Sept. 25, are not only a showcase of athletic prowess, but also a dazzling display of technological wonders. China has spared no effort to impress the world with its cutting-edge innovations in various domains. Here are some of the most remarkable examples of what I call “black technologies” that have made the games a spectacle to behold:
– Digital torchbearers: This is the first time that the Asian Games have used holograms to create virtual torchbearers who can carry the flame across different locations and interact with real people and surroundings. The digital torchbearers include some of the most famous and influential figures in sports, entertainment, and history, such as Yao Ming, Jackie Chan, and Confucius.
– Electronic identity registration cards: These are smart devices that replace the traditional paper-based accreditation cards for all participants. They can perform multiple functions, such as verifying identity, controlling access, monitoring health, making payments, and providing information. They also support various authentication methods, such as NFC, QR code, and biometrics, making them convenient and secure.
– Digital spectator service platform: This is a comprehensive platform that offers a range of features and services for both online and offline audiences. For example, users can watch live streams, replays, highlights, and VR videos of the games; chat with athletes, coaches, and experts; join quizzes, games, and lucky draws; and access information about venues, transportation, tourism, and culture.
– Intelligent robots: These are robots that can assist in various scenarios and tasks. For example, there are robots for guest reception, patrolling, firefighting, and distribution; robots for public performances, such as dancing and drumming; robots for sports training, such as playing table tennis and badminton; and robots for media coverage, such as interviewing and reporting.
These “black technologies” reflect China’s leadership in digital transformation and innovation. They also add to the cultural significance and social value of the Hangzhou Asian Games. By blending technology and culture, the Hangzhou Asian Games have created a new paradigm of sports events that is more intelligent, interactive, and inclusive.
Blueberry Dumpling Cobbler
This is good served warm with vanilla ice cream. Strawberries may be substituted for the blueberries.
Bring blueberries, 1 1/3 cups sugar and butter to a boil in a large saucepan over medium heat, stirring gently until butter is melted and sugar dissolves. Remove from heat.
Beat cream cheese and 2/3 cup sugar with an electric mixer until fluffy; add milk and beat until smooth.
By hand stir in Bisquick mix and uncooked oats.
Spread two-thirds of dumpling mixture onto bottom of a lightly greased 9 x 13 inch baking dish.
Spoon blueberry mixture evenly over dumpling mixture.
Dollop remaining dumpling mixture evenly over blueberries.
Bake at 350 degrees F for 35 minutes.
This is a Briefing, I’m not asking for your consent.
I love how in this altered timeline, the relationship between Picard and Riker is completely different. Far more strained and much less casual as well. It’s little touches like that that make the overall picture clearer and more believable. Great writing and great execution by a very talented group of actors.
Hersh Reveals U.S. Motive For Destruction Of Nord Stream Pipelines
Seymour Hersh just published a new piece about the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines.
When the pipelines were blown up on September 27 2022 I had asked:
It was no surprise to the agency’s secret planning group when on January 27, 2022, the assured and confident Nuland, then undersecretary of state for political affairs, stridently warned Putin that if he invaded Ukraine, as he clearly was planning to, that “one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” The line attracted enormous attention, but the words preceding the threat did not. The official State Department transcript shows that she preceded her threat by saying that with regard to the pipeline: “We continue to have very strong and clear conversations with our German allies.” … The German leader was considered then—and now—by some members of the CIA team to be fully aware of the secret planning underway to destroy the pipelines. … What I did not know then, but was told recently, was that after Biden’s extraordinary public threat to blow up Nord Stream 2, with Scholz standing next to him, the CIA planning group was told by the White House that there would be no immediate attack on the two pipelines, but the group should arrange to plant the necessary bombs and be ready to trigger them “on demand”—after the war began. “It was then that we”—the small planning group that was working in Oslo with the Royal Norwegian Navy and special services on the project—“understood that the attack on the pipelines was not a deterrent because as the war went on we never got the command.”
After Biden’s order to trigger the explosives planted on the pipelines, it took only a short flight with a Norwegian fighter and the dropping of an altered off-the-shelf sonar device at the right spot in the Baltic Sea to get it done. By then the CIA group had long disbanded. By then, too, the official told me: “We realized that the destruction of the two Russian pipelines was not related to the Ukrainian war”—Putin was in the process of annexing the four Ukrainian oblasts he wanted—“but was part of a neocon political agenda to keep Scholz and Germany, with winter coming up and the pipelines shut down, from getting cold feet and opening up” the shuttered Nord Stream 2. “The White House fear was that Putin would get Germany under his thumb and then he was going to get Poland.” … All of this explains why a routine question I posed a month or so after the bombings to someone with many years in the American intelligence community led me to a truth that no one in America or Germany seems to want to pursue. My question was simple: “Who did it?”
The Biden administration blew up the pipelines but the action had little to do with winning or stopping the war in Ukraine. It resulted from fears in the White House that Germany would waver and turn on the flow of Russia gas—and that Germany and then NATO, for economic reasons, would fall under the sway of Russia and its extensive and inexpensive natural resources. And thus followed the ultimate fear: that America would lose its long-standing primacy in Western Europe.
The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will now have to answer some serious questions …
Posted by b on September 26, 2023 at 14:26 UTC | Permalink
Get Out of America Now… Something Strange is Happening
“Hey fam! Let’s talk about why we believe you should leave America for good. Back in 2020 we left America and have never returned and hope to never go back. As time goes on, the country isn’t getting better from everything that happened with the planned-demic and now hyper-inflation. What do you think? Will you be leaving America in search of greener pastures? It’s up to you to decide!”
Mainstream Media Admit – Ukraine’s Propaganda Is Full Of Lies
As a sign of the turning narrative of the war in Ukraine we find a new New York Times piece about ‘disinformation’ that is not about Russia but about lies from Ukraine.
Andrew E. Kramer, the NYT correspondent in Kiev, opens with an anecdote from the first weeks of the war:
Six weeks after Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Ukraine sank the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, dealing a serious blow to the enemy navy, and, a Ukrainian official said, killing the ship’s captain.
“We do not mourn,” an adviser to the interior minister at the time, Anton Gerashchenko, said.
The only problem was that the captain — or somebody who resembled him — later appeared in a video of survivors released by the Russian Navy. He had escaped his sinking ship, the Moskva, the video seemed to indicate.
Then comes a paragraph that could fit both countries but the following one it is again related to disinformation from Ukraine:
What is clear is that misdirection, disinformation and propaganda are weapons regularly deployed in Russia’s war in Ukraine to buoy spirits at home, demoralize the enemy or lead opponents into a trap. And it is often hard to know when reports are false or why they may have been disseminated.
Now, Ukraine and Russia are offering dueling narratives over whether a more senior Russian naval officer, the commanding admiral of the Black Sea Fleet, is alive or dead.
Few military analysts, […], believe the Ukrainian military’s optimistic daily account of Russian casualties running into the hundreds that is nonetheless reported widely in Ukrainian media.
It is the first time I see a public refutation of Ukraine’s laughable claims about Russian casualties in the mainstream media. It is also an indictment of the Biden administration and the Pentagon who publicly use the Ukrainian numbers.
The piece ends with a wise acknowledgement:
Mr. Gerashchenko said that, in the end, war propaganda is only effective when it accompanies battlefield successes. The missile strike on the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet last week, he said, was a “stunning success of Ukrainian intelligence and the air force that fired the cruise missiles on a supposedly well-defended site.”
“You cannot win the propaganda war without winning the real war,” he added.
Good to see that this obvious truth is finally sinking in.
—
Yesterday the Minister of Defense in Russia, Sergei Shoigu, gave an update (in Russian) on the war in Ukraine. The speech seemed to include a time frame for the war to end (machine translation):
The United States and its allies continue to arm the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and the Kiev regime throws untrained soldiers into senseless assaults, for slaughter.
Such cynical actions by the West and their cronies in Kiev only encourage Ukraine to self-destruct.”
“Under these conditions, we continue to increase the combat power of the Armed Forces, including through the supply of modern weapons and improving the training of troops, taking into account the experience of a special military operation. Consistent implementation of the activities of the Action Plan until 2025 will allow us to achieve our goals.”
Shoigu expects the war to run throughout 2024 and into 2025. But if the current loss rate of the Ukrainian army continues the country will be running out of soldiers and armored vehicles before the end of next year.
Posted by b on September 27, 2023 at 13:50 UTC | Permalink
Ask Prof Wolff: China Vs. a Myth of Stolen Technology
China has pulled it off because it is unique with huge, diligent and hard working population, and a one party state with consistent long term goals but flexible enough to adapt and adopt so as to be pragmatic.
Other Asian and South East Asian countries have similar ethos but their populations and geographical size are much smaller.
More to the point, those countries have multi-party political systems that would ensure continuous changes to whatever the previous government has done, ie no consistency in long term targets but all short term political gains (Western style).
Vietnam is actually a communist country but the US and the West like Vietnam; they rarely publicly criticise or smear Vietnam because it is not seen as a “threat”.
Singapore is a prosperous city state virtually dominated by one political party.
Rarely, if any, have I seen negative opinions of Singapore from the West. Some local and Asian people think that Singapore acts like a dictator.
So you know what I am leading to.
Political system may or may not matter. It is a matter of effective governance.
During an interview, the founder of Huawei questioned that how could the West accuse Huawei of stealing technologies from them that they had not got?
A senior employee said in an interview about 5G that the company had been researching on 6G several years ago.
By the end of 2020 the entire underground transport network in Shanghai was covered by 5G.
In contrast, the Mayor of London has promised to cover the entire London Underground network with 4G by the end of 2024.
That’s how much more advanced Chinese technology is in terms of development and implementation. Without Western interference of all kinds, I bet that African nations with help from China will leapfrog the West.
This may sound far-fetched.
The US will do its utmost, including starting a war and regime change, to next suppress the rise of Africa.
Many areas on the Belt and Road Initiative have since 2013 had bombings, massive political protests and chaotic civil wars etc.
This is the dirty work done by a particular organization to stop the success of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
If China and the Chinese had the technology to migrate to live in Mars, I bet the US would try to stop the Chinese travel in mid-space.
Grounding an adult has no effect other than making them more belligerent.
Instead, I changed her living conditions…
Turned off her phone service
Changed the wifi password
Changed the password for all TV services and accounts
Put a lock on the laundry room door, where the breaker box just happened to be located
Flipped the breaker for her room
Finally, I ordered take out for me for a full week and bought no groceries
After a week, she came in throwing a tantrum. I was abusing her! How dare I do this to her.
I calmly told her that family enjoys the perks of living in a family, including my electricity and food…but they also are respectful, do household chores or pay their share. Squatters get no considerations of family. And next week, there will be a lock on my room and no hot water in my guest bathroom.
She was a butthead for another week. She talked to other adults and the cops and CPS (who asked if she was a vulnerable adult who needed guardianship)…then decided being pleasant and respectful and doing about 2 hours of chores a week was worth the perks of being family.
I never raised my voice, never argued with her, simply impressed upon her what I no longer HAD to provide for an adult.
‘Armed to the Teeth’ Frankish Warrior’s Untouched Grave Found
In a discovery that has left historians and archaeologists astonished, a completely untouched grave from the Merovingian period was uncovered in Germany. Hidden among other graves that were plundered over a millennium ago, this singular grave had rested undisturbed for over 1,300 years.
The discovery was made by the archaeologists from the Kaiserpfalz Research Center , who have been digging at this early medieval burial ground since 2015. Christoph Bassler, excavation manager described the discovery:
“We first spotted the edge of a shield boss…It wasn’t immediately clear which grave it belonged to. But, as we dug further, the realization dawned that we had stumbled upon a grave that, for some reason, had been overlooked by ancient grave robbers.”
A 7th Century Frankish Warrior, ‘Armed to the Teeth’
The grave’s occupant, known as the “warrior from grave 447,” was evidently someone of importance in his time. A splendid double-edged sword, or ‘spathe’, lay next to him, measuring nearly 93 cm (3 foot) in its entirety. Its blade, even after so many centuries, remains slightly flexible , pointing to an impeccable state of preservation, noted Bassler.
The sword wasn’t the Frankish warrior’s only companion in the afterlife. A massive broadaxe, another heavy knife, a lance tip, and a shield were found, showcasing an array of almost every weapon from that era—except for a bow.
Interestingly, while adorned with an impressive weaponry collection, this man was not a full-time soldier. In the early Middle Ages , there were no standing armies as we know them today. Free men were expected to gear up and respond to their leader’s call to arms when required.
The Franks in Europe
The Franks, one of the prominent Germanic tribes, played a central role in the reshaping of European geography and politics after the fall of the Roman Empire . Their history in the region was rich and transformative.
Between the 5th and the 8th centuries, with the decline of Roman power, the Franks under King Clovis I unified various Frankish tribes and expanded their territories. In 486 AD, Clovis defeated the last Roman governor in Gaul, marking the end of Roman rule in that region. Clovis and his successors, known as the Merovingians, expanded the Frankish kingdom into what is now Germany, establishing a significant portion of the region as “Austrasia.” Under the Merovingians, the Franks converted to Christianity, and the fusion of Germanic and Roman traditions began.
Secrets Remain intact, For Now
While the grave’s goods have been handed over for restoration, further studies are expected to shed light on the precise dating and intricate details obscured by rust. For instance, silver inlays hidden beneath the rust layers, might offer deeper insights into the artistry of the time. “This incredible discovery adds a significant piece to our understanding of early medieval Ingelheim,” remarked department head Eveline Breyer.
Analyses are also underway to ascertain the cause of the man’s death, who was believed to be in his 30s or 40s when he passed. Whether he succumbed to illness or fell in battle remains to be seen, but given his grave’s martial ambiance, a warrior’s end in combat wouldn’t be unexpected.
Typically China doesn’t use political muscle to counter Anti Chinese sanctions or Anti Chinese hostility
China is in a very good position today
It is very strong, it is bustling with emerging technologies, every day sees new developments and it’s people are enjoying the lowest inflation possible and saving the most money in the world with very little personal debt
China is developing at a very rapid pace and surging ahead
It’s Military and Navy are building up at a rate that the US has not hit since 1944
Israel placed an order for 1.5 Million units of Body Armor Vests for their Paramilitary with China
Delivery within 30 days
Express order at 2.5 times original tender price
Bangladesh can do it, India can do it
Yet the quality, price and time taken combo is entirely Chinas baby
No Nation on earth can come even 50% close
At this stage, China is too prosperous to get into fights and get into any situation that could jeopardize it’s progress
In fact if you go to China, you will realize that a Company sanctioned by US is a MARK OF HONOR in Beijing
DJI is flush with orders from South America, Central America and the Middle East today
They lost a potential $ 4 Billion of deals in US and Europe and gained almost the entire $ 4 Billion in Saudi, Oman, Qatar and Brazil and Peru
Huawei has China
The Sheer Network in China alone would ensure Huawei covers 5G for 1.4 Billion people
Add the BRI Nations and another 36 Nations and you have a whopping 3.47 Billion People who are using Huawei equipment for their 5G
Plus Chinas smartphone market of 867 Million Units a year is more than US and EU and UK and Japan combined (574 Million Units)
Plus Huawei is an expert at using Western IP developed for Billions using a few tweaks and minting money on the same by spending pennies on the dollar
Best example is 3G and 4G.
The Collective West spent almost $ 15 Billion on the development
Huawei modified these IP and developed their 5G Patents by spending a mere $ 600 Million
Thus while Cisco hasn’t even recovered 15% of it’s investments, Huawei has already quadrupled it’s investments in 5G
China thus is in the best position to just sit by and surge ahead while doing very little
Things are so good for them that any counter action could make things worse
Huawei too is building a base among its Global South clients and will ultimately reach the peak without the West or their markets
Don’t under estimate China
They use their soft power for other things
This UNHRC is the best example
The Collective West twisted arms until they broke
Yet China grinned and became a full member for 2 more years
The Collective West twisted arms until they broke to avoid the BRICS expansion or the G20 condemnation of Putin
China crushed both these plans through tough diplomatic manoeuvres
The US is in a very weak place
It’s breaking up and is in deep trouble
Thus all this posturing to divert attention from the problems at home.
Same for UK, Canada and Europe
China has no such diversion needed
They just want to keep doing their job – developing Technology and soft power and surging ahead
FIRST TIME REACTING TO | Merkules ”Rich Men North Of Richmond” Remix
He’s been around many years. A true badass rapper. Dudes flow is always crazy.
I was 14. No friends. Each day I dragged myself home to where I lived with my schizophrenic Mother, just the two of us.
I would be in trouble for something: I lived in a perpetual state of confusion as I often couldn’t remember what she told me I had done.
She told me I was stupid and needed to go to a special school because I didn’t know what I had done wrong.
In the past she had often slapped me until my nose bled and beat me with the metal pole of a fly swatter, but that stopped the summer before high school.
She told me she didn’t love me repeatedly for months.
According to her I was a horrible daughter.
Her friends from church had stopped coming weekly to yell at me and slap me senseless as well. I knew when she sent me away with my Aunt and Uncle the summer that had passed she had read my diary, where I detailed all the abuse and talked about wanting to die.
She denied reading it, but it stopped the physical abuse so now it was just verbal and believe it or not that hurt just as bad.
I was unloveable and alone.
She didn’t work and depended on government assistance.
She just sat at home chain smoking and playing cards.
During the week I woke myself up, made breakfast, went to school. She complained about the smell of eggs in the morning and of course I was useless.
I had a hard time socializing, and she decided she didn’t like the friends I’d managed to make the previous year, so put me in a very small private Christian high school the church paid for.
As a low income, single parent house I was a freak among higher income two parent families.
So I spent my days an outsider and bullied at school and then came home to be bullied some more.
I got in trouble once because someone told her I walked around with my head down and never smiled!
I remember trying out and making the school play that year. I was so proud.
My Mother decided to use that as leverage for her every whim: if I did anything wrong (sang doing dishes) she threatened to not allow me to be in the play. It got so bad I just quit the play rather than have it continually be held over my head as a threat.
A school councillor regularily made me talk to him.
I refused to give anything up.
He persisted. He asked me if I was abused: as she was no longer hitting me I said no.
I had no words to explain the verbal abuse.
Being stupid and unloveable didn’t seem to qualify.
Then one magical day a girl at school approached me and we became friends.
A few weeks later she asked me if I could spend the weekend at her house.
Her house was beautiful and she lived with her parents and siblings and it was loud, noisy and chaotic.
On the Saturday of this weekend sleep over, my new friend had to take piano lessons so I was to hang out in her room until she got back.
I was surprised when both her parents wanted to speak with me while she was gone.
They informed me that the school had asked them to be my foster parents and presented me with a ‘contract’.
They gave me 30 minutes to decide if I wanted to live with them.
I was 14 years old.
I had no friends.
My Mother was the only family I had ever known.
I knew I was stupid. I knew that I was worthless and unloveable. 30 minutes was a ridiculous amount of time for a decision that would change the course of my life that I was too young to make. I didn’t know these people at all.
But a voice in my head screamed at me to do it, with everything it had.
So I took that leap of faith. I jumped off the cliff away from everything I’d ever known.
My roller coaster ride wasn’t over my any means, but to this day I am so grateful I left.
My life 30 years later is wonderful and I often wonder where I would be if I had stayed growing up in that horrible house.
The United States is confirming that the first (official) group of M1A1 Abrams tanks have arrived in Ukraine to be used against Russia. The escalation of fighting between Russia and Ukraine continues.
At some point, and we are now very close to it, Russia is going to declare the US a “combatant” in the fighting, and when that takes place, it will be public notice that we — here in the USA — are now subject to Russian military strikes.
Americans will be caught completely blind-sided if and when this takes place; they won’t understand how or why we got attacked by Russia – because our Mass-Media has not done its job to inform the public just how far our government public servants have escalated the fighting.
China just gave US chip materials’ permission, the US ordered to escalate sanctions against China!
For me, the most surprising thing about being rich is that it’s an incredibly isolating experience. What I mean by that is you can’t really complain about your problems except within your small circle of rich friends. Otherwise, you will sound like a douchebag. Even if you do, non-rich people can’t really empathize with you.
There are a few problems associated with being rich such as general (lack of) motivation for work, family/friends asking for money, worry for how to motivate kids, spouse with different attitudes toward life after getting rich, potential spouse being a gold digger, unexpected jealous reaction from friends/family, pressure to deal with more complex tax, estate planning and investment planning and etc.
The joy of “set for life” doesn’t seem to offset the anxiety from hoarding the huge sum of money. In addition, when you don’t work because you are rich but can’t hang out with your friends who have to work during the week, you feel like an outcast of society.
Overall, being rich is very isolating and that’s the most surprising thing I have experienced.
China’s new missile DF 51, called a small Sarmat, can evade the Aegis defense system at sea
The New DF-51 ballistic missile can carry 10 miniature missiles. When the DF-51 flies to a certain area and launches 10 atomic bombs at the same time, the power is so great that the existing air defense system of the United States cannot bear it at all.
I watched a 90 lb female put a 235 lb guy in the hospital. This was a fight between 2 neighbors in my neighborhood. This guy harassed her for weeks then for some reason he decided to walk up to her front porch and knock on her door. I was sitting on my front porch when it happened. I was thinking this is not going to be good, and had my cell phone within reach.
She open her door and in a clear loud voice, she requested he get off her property. He said, what are you going to do about it. She said, I’ll call the police. He laughed at her and reached for the screen door. Before I could move she kicked him in the head twice, swept his legs out from under him, and he was down and bleeding.
I started to call the police, but again before I could dial the number a patrol car pulled up and the officer put the guy in handcuffs. I just sat there, drank my coffee and waited for him to come over and ask what I saw. I told him and signed the bottom of the form.
As he walked away he said you know the woman? I replied yes, she’s a former Marine. He chuckled and said. I guess the guy didn’t know that, and I laughed.
How I see the US after living in Europe for 5 years
“I moved to France 5 years ago. Came home to Maryland to spend Christmas with the family. I got sick, went to the ER, and came out with a bill worth $1,900. The doctor saw me a week later for a follow-up. I needed surgery and it would cost more than $ 45,000. I went back to France after the holidays, saw a doctor, got surgery, 2 months off work and I PAID NOTHING. “
In 1974, Xi volunteered to go to Liangjiahe, a dirt-poor village in Northwestern China. His dad was getting the rough treatment during the Cultural Revolution, so he probably felt that getting out of Beijing was a safer move. So he volunteered.
China’s GDP per capita in the 70’s was around $100 per year, which is obviously not great. But Liangjiahe was a totally different ball game. It was a famously poor place. I would guess the GDP per capita was maybe $20 a year. No, I did’t miss any zeros. It was really that poor. There was no electricity, no indoor plumbing, no toilet, no heat, no rice or flour. Corn was a luxury, millet and wild grass were the normal diet. and people just dug dirt caves out of mountains to live.
The villagers that Xi lived with – were mostly illiterate and covered in fleas. So Xi looked around, and was like, fleas, oh well, I just have to get used to it. Food? That’s OK, I’ll take a hoe and go farm with the villagers. We can feed ourselves. Electricity? Water? Nah, nothing can be done about that. So what do we have? Poop! OK, so we have poop. We can make something with that, maybe.
So he read about fermenting poop to make methane gas, and tried to build a poop-fermenter in his village, so that people can use it for light and cooking at night. He was only 16 or 17 at that time, so he wasn’t very good and got the pipe stuck, so he had to jump into the cesspool to clear the pipe, and got poop all over himself, but he got it working. The next year he traded his motorbike for a water pump and some other tools for the village, and pretty soon his village was getting more prosperous. He stayed and worked in that village for 7 years, applied to join the CCP 10 times, got rejected 9 times, and finally got admitted on the 10th time. The villagers promptly elected him the Party Secretary of the village.
That was how he started his political career in China.
He’s not unique.
Actually, all of China’s leaders have been through absolute hell to get to where they are.
CCP tradition is that unless you start from the very bottom, you’ll never get to the very top. I mean, you are selecting 7 out of 80 million, once every 10 years, so the CCP traditionally has been absolutely ruthless in terms of discipline and promotion.
Election bribery? Expel 70.
Industrial accident? Send 25 to jail.
Corruption? Punish 100,000 in one year.
Get GDP to grow at 10%+, while keep your nose clean? OK, you get a one step promotion.
A small purge once every 2 years.
A big purge once every 5 years.
You’ve got to beat out 80 million people to get there, and everybody is swimming as hard as you are. The ones who pop out at the end, after 35 years, are all NOT your normal people!
When Beijing announced the plan to eliminate extreme poverty in 2015, most foreign observers were dubious. Can China Wipe Out Poverty By 2020?
Since the announcement, People Daily, the top Chinese newspaper, has been literally reporting on poverty reduction DAILY – success, failure, method, strategy, recidivism, lessons learned, statistics, etc. Everyday! I suspect the guy is actually serious about it.
Why I Am Leaving The United States and Never Coming Back
In this video I will be explaining why i am leaving the united states and never coming back. this discussion consists of reasons like social life in the united states, dating in the united states, cost of living for quality of life and more. I am going to thailand for the first time leaving the country in a couple months. expect upcoming traveling vlogs.
I sit behind the students and use an iPad hooked up to a projector to show them things on a screen in front of them.
It’s a really big screen, too. It’s one of those “backyard movie projection” screens, for which I built a frame and now it’s taking up the better part of one wall in my classroom. I have the projector at the back of the classroom, aiming over the students’ heads. And, since the projector is next to my desk (which is a sit/stand desk, by the way), I can physically plug my iPad into it. I tried doing this all wirelessly a few years ago, but it was more trouble than it was worth.
Usually, I’m showing them pages from their textbooks or workbooks. I snap pictures of the relevant pages for that day, turn them all into a single .pdf, and work my way through them, for the class to see. I use an Apple Pencil to mark them us as I go.
If the students seem bored, I ask for volunteers to come over to the iPad and do a few problems for everyone to see. The students enjoy it when one of their classmates takes on the role of “teacher.” The students who are taking on that role enjoy using the iPad and Apple Pencil.
Every now and then, I have to sub in another teacher’s classroom for a single period. No one else at this school has a set-up like mine. I genuinely don’t understand how teachers can stand being in front of their students while they’re trying to teach them, writing things on a whiteboard. Turning your back on your students while you write on the board is nerve-racking for me.
As an added bonus, when I’m using the iPad as a whiteboard or e-reader, and our textbook mentions something interesting, I can quickly and easily pull up YouTube or Safari, to enlighten the students a little more. Just this morning, our lesson on appositives featured 10 sentences about jazz music, including several about Louis Armstrong and Wynton Marsalis. I was able to pull up videos of both men, so the students could see who we were learning about. I was then able to find out that, not only is Marsalis still alive (the students asked me), but he’s playing in Chicago next spring.
At least once per day, I pull up something online that one of our textbooks mentions, to teach the students a little more about it.
Originally, I sat behind my students so I could see their screens when they were online. Yes, there is monitoring software, but just looking around at their screens in much easier. That was 15 years ago, when I began teaching. I’ve been doing it like this ever since.
The Video I Never Wanted to Make.
This is honestly getting scary hopefully it doesn’t get as bad as we all think but something tells me that we may not get that lucky. Crazy to think I am only 28 years old and I am prepper but i might have to start teaching my family how to do this stuff. Everyone stay safe.
Several years ago I inherited a “team” of people that included a lady I’ll call “Nancy.” She was what we called a houseplant: she’d been there forever and didn’t do much, but firing her would be a mess.
Nancy was a disaster from day 1. She would take two hour lunches. She’d hand in work so poor I could have just done it.
I once asked her to compile a spreadsheet and all she did was dump files into a folder and send it to me. She literally had one job of compiling a single report that she was doing. We even made her a simple guide that anyone could follow. We had her do this because it kept her away from everyone.
She also had beefs with three of my other people, so much that I moved people around the office to avoid her. She once accused a lady of drinking beer at her desk and it turned out to be some generic cola from Winn Dixie. When she wasn’t satisfied by this she reported me and the lady to HR. One fellow on my team was on long term pain management after being wounded by an IED in Afghanistan. He took some serious pain medication but he was a fantastic employee. Again, she called HR on him after telling her to mind her own business. When HR didn’t do anything she called the police and tried to have him arrested for drug possession.
One day we were doing end-of-year reporting and needed the report that Nancy was running. I go to the share drive and it’s empty. I ask her for it and she claims it’s there. I check again and it’s just raw data from our database.
I go over to her desk and ask what was happening. She immediately lies and says I never told her about the report. I point out the file detailing the steps on how to pull the report on her desktop.
One of my other employees, Wondah (pronounced Wanda) walks over and is trying to help. Nancy keeps trying to just push her away or delete files. Wondah tells her she’s costing us time and resources and it hits. Nancy looks at Wondah and yells “Shut up n*gger!”
The office goes quiet. I take two steps back. I put my hand on Wondah’s shoulder and gently pull her back a bit. I call over a neutral guy on another team. I ask him to walk Nancy out of the office and wait.
30 seconds later I’m on a conference call with HR confirming she’s getting fired. Wondah and five other employees confirm what she said.
I walk out in the hallway. Any illusion of civility is gone. Now she’s spitting and swearing at everyone. I tell her she’s fired. I get deluged by a string of racist screeds and threats to send her sons to my house to kill me. Security is there to escort her out. She turns and spits at me.
She tried suing the company for everything under the sun. On the stand she was a total disaster of a witness and I think the jury hated her as much as I did at that point.
She lost and had to pay our legal fees. Last I heard she’d fled the country to avoid paying a bunch of debts.
As a gullible 30 y.o. I met a really cute man that seemed to like me. We started dating. His car broke down and he asked to borrow $80. I loaned it to him and he returned it. About 6 weeks later, his Mom had an emergency and he needed $400 and asked to borrow it until the next payday. I loaned it to him. Then I found out he had a live-in girlfriend and child. She came to my work and tried to beat me up for trying to steal her boyfriend. I broke up with him but I tried to get my money back. That wasn’t happening. He kept trying to get back with me, but I found a note that he had written about how much money I had in my checking account. He didn’t realize it had fallen out of wherever he put it. So I decided to beat him at his own game. I asked him to meet me for lunch at a restaurant. I had stashed a dear friend of mine at another table within ear shot and vision of what I was doing. I had handwritten a small “loan agreement with interest” that I told him I needed him to sign for me to rebuild trusting him. The Sucker signed it thinking it wasn’t valid. My friend witnessed it and signed as a witness. I then took him to Small Claims Court, asked for damages and Court costs, garnished his wages, and got my money back over time, including interest.
10 Reasons Why You Should NEVER Move to the United States
The USA has become a TERRIBLE place.
Apricot Cobbler
Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients
Filling
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 cup water
3 (15 1/4 ounce) cans apricot halves, drained
1 tablespoon butter
Topping
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons cold butter
1/2 cup milk
Instructions
Filling
In a saucepan, combine sugar, cornstarch, cinnamon and nutmeg.
Stir in water; bring to a boil over medium heat. Boil and stir for 1 minute; reduce heat.
Add apricots and butter; heat through. Pour into a greased 2 quart baking dish.
Topping
Combine flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in a bowl; cut in butter until crumbly.
Stir in milk just until moistened. Spoon over hot apricot mixture.
Bake at 400 degrees F for 30 to 35 minutes or until golden brown and a wooden pick inserted into the topping comes out clean.
When I was 14 years old my Mom suddenly decided she wanted to move to Colorado. Apparently it was a place she had always wanted to see, so next thing I knew we were living in the ultra small town of Limon, Colorado. I was not happy about this at all. My brother, who was 19 at the time, had stayed in South Carolina. All of my friends were still in South Carolina. I was miserable.
I spent my freshman year in Limon, and hated almost everything about it. The one part I didn’t hate was that my freshman class of 30 students included 5 guys and 25 girls. That was fun. On the other hand, I was the fattest kid in school, so even playing football didn’t help me in that arena.
One day, about a week after school let out for summer, I was sitting in my bedroom listening to music when I suddenly really wanted to hang out with my brother. I didn’t even think about it. I grabbed my rucksack that I used for camping, loaded it up with clothes, my radio and some tapes (this was 1990), and I walked out the door. I was going to hitchhike the almost 1500 miles to South Carolina.
It took me 63 hours to get there. To this day I am amazed at how easy it actually was, and how fast I made it there. What’s even more amazing is that when I showed up at my Aunt’s front door (my brother was living with her after we moved) it was my Mom who met me at the door. As soon as she had gotten home from work and I wasn’t there she knew what I had done and where I was going. Since she was able to drive straight through she made the trip far quicker than I did.
My Mom was angry, but she was just as relieved that I was safe, so she agreed that we could stay for one week before we headed back to Limon. That was on a Friday. The following Wednesday was June 6th, 1990. That date might not matter to most people, but it was very important to us, because of this:
A tornado ripped through the town, destroying almost half of the town – including the apartment we were living in at the time. If we hadn’t been in South Carolina, I would have been home when it came through, and likely would not be alive right now.
Oddly enough, this would not be the last time something like that would happen to me. In 2010 I made the split-second decision to move back to South Carolina again, leaving behind my apartment in Joplin, Missouri. I had already been planning to move, but my plan had been to go to Florida to be near my parents. At the last minute my Mom told me not to come because the Space Center had just laid off 10,000 NASA employees, and that was a job market I did not want to try to compete in during those hard times. I could have stayed in Joplin, but I had already sold off most of my furniture, so I just decided, “Screw it, I’ll go back to South Carolina.”
A year later, Joplin was hit by an F5 tornado that destroyed almost 25% of the town — including the apartment I had been living in when I was there. Combined with the fact that an entire street I lived on in South Carolina was destroyed by a tornado a couple years after I moved away, and the fact that I left South Carolina months before Hurricane Hugo hit, and again just before Hurricane Andrew hit, and now my friends joke that if I ever move away they are all coming with me.
Jamaican Sista Warns Black Immigrants, The American Dream Is A Farce Because US Is A Plantation
“You will work until you are literally DEAD!”
Stacked 1,400-Year-Old Zhou Dynasty Emperor’s Tomb Uncovered in China
Archaeologists in Shaanxi Province, northwest China, have discovered the tomb of Emperor Xiaomin (birth name Yuwen Jue), the founding emperor of the Northern Zhou Dynasty (557-581). Emperor Xiaomin’s tomb, a medium-sized one in the context of the Northern Zhou dynasty, is situated in Beihe Village, Weicheng District, Xianyang, an area known for its concentration of high-quality tombs spanning from the Northern Dynasties (439-581) to the Sui and Tang dynasties (581-907).
Uncovering Zhou Dynasty Emperor Tomb: Medium-Sized but Power Packed
The tomb itself faces south and is a single-chamber soil cave tomb with four patios along the sloping tomb passage, according to a press announcement by Shaanxi Academy of Archaeology on Tuesday. Covering a total length of 56.84 meters (186.5 ft) from north to south, the bottom of the tomb lies 10 meters (32.8 ft) beneath the current surface.
According to the press announcement:
“The archaeological discovery of Yuwen Jue’s tomb from the Northern Zhou Dynasty is of great significance. It is the second Northern Zhou emperor’s tomb that has been excavated after the Xiaoling Mausoleum of Emperor Wu of the Northern Zhou Dynasty.”
Though the tomb had previously been looted, archaeologists have managed to recover 146 burial objects, primarily pottery figurines in a single chamber holding funerary offerings, depicting warriors and cavalry units. Furthermore, the presence of an epitaph on the tomb’s eastern side has allowed archaeologists to confirm that the tomb belonged to Emperor Xiaomin (542-557), reports Heritage Daily .
This discovery holds immense significance for historical research into the emperors of the Northern Dynasty , as highlighted by Zhao Zhanrui, an assistant researcher at the academy.
Northern Zhou: Foundation of a Short-Lived Dynasty
Rather than assuming the title of emperor, Xiaomin, also known as Emperor Ming of Northern Zhou, chose to adopt the Zhou Dynasty’s title of “Heavenly Prince.” However, his reign was marred by internal strife and power struggles. A significant conflict unfolded between Xiaomin and his cousin, Yuwen Hu, who sought to consolidate his own power.
In a dramatic turn of events, Yuwen Hu managed to depose Xiaomin from his position and subsequently had him killed. This political maneuvering further highlighted the instability and internal divisions that plagued the Northern Zhou Dynasty during its relatively brief existence.
The Northern Zhou Dynasty , which reigned from 557 to 581 AD, was a significant but relatively short-lived era in the history of ancient China . Founded by Yuwen Tai, who took the title of Emperor Wen upon his ascent to power, the dynasty was established following a successful rebellion against the ruling Northern Wei Dynasty .
The Northern Zhou’s capital was Chang’an, an influential city located in what is now Xi’an, Shaanxi Province. Chang’an was known for its cultural richness and strategic importance as a center of trade and governance .
One of the most notable aspects of the Northern Zhou Dynasty was its association with Buddhism. Emperor Wen and his successor, Emperor Wu, were fervent Buddhists, and they played a pivotal role in promoting Buddhism as the state religion. They supported the construction of Buddhist temples , sponsored the translation of Buddhist scriptures, and actively contributed to the growth of Buddhism in China. This period marked a significant turning point in Chinese religious and cultural history.
Emperor Wen and Emperor Wu also implemented important political reforms aimed at strengthening the central authority of the emperor. Land redistribution was one such reform, aimed at reducing the power of the aristocracy and redistributing land to the common people. These efforts were indicative of the dynasty’s desire to create a more equitable society.
Despite these reforms, the Northern Zhou Dynasty faced challenges. The empire’s unity weakened over time, leading to regional fragmentation and conflicts among various power centers. Eventually, the Northern Zhou Dynasty succumbed to internal strife, and it was conquered by the Sui Dynasty in 581. This marked the end of the dynasty’s relatively short but culturally impactful existence.
Legacy and Historical Relevance of the Northern Zhou
The legacy of the Northern Zhou Dynasty lives on in several ways. Its patronage of Buddhism had a lasting influence on Chinese religion, culture, and art. The dynasty’s contributions to calligraphy and sculpture, particularly in the context of Buddhist art, marked significant advancements in Chinese culture. Furthermore, some of its political reforms, such as those related to land distribution, influenced subsequent Chinese dynasties, including the powerful Tang Dynasty.
Notably, the Northern Zhou Dynasty was unique in its ethnic background. Its founding emperor, Yuwen Tai, belonged to the Xianbei ethnic group, making the dynasty one of the few in Chinese history to be ruled by a non-Han Chinese ethnic group, a rarity.
FILIPINA WIFE DEFENDING PASSPORT BROS.
One of the best, most intelligent responses to these woke, American women. Thanks Leah. You and Gary have a great family and life. Wish you both the best!
When I was a young boy, perhaps in first grade, my father had a business trip up into New Foundland. And there, he did some work and (apparently) attended a local festival.
When he came back, he had a special gift for me.
It was a full Scottish kilt ensemble.
And I, well I wore it with pride, and being the photo buff that he was, took a zillion pictures of me wearing the outfit.
I don’t know what ever happened to the outfit, or the pictures, but I do remember that time, and how I felt being parading about in Bridgeport Conn wearing that kilt.
…
My dad was kind of silly. But he was cool in a strange way. And this little event is one of my best memories.
The U.S. have a right to adopt or adapt any any stance it wants. Or behaves as obnoxiously and despicably as ot wants too! But China will act swiftly in its own path forward to protect and defend and its own territories including Taiwan. And the world’s 99% will be behind China solidly. The Taiwan issue is totally and absolutely none of US or anybody’s business except the Chinese people and the Chinese authorities. Get that through your think skull once and for all.
You can talk as much shit, or stir as much shit as you want but touching an inch of Taiwan and we all go to war fully and comprehensively till the world as we know it will be change forever. If that is what you want. Let that be absolutely clear even a single U.S. marine parachute into Taiwan and China will without a doubt take drastic and immediate action.
No go back to asking shit like this and waste all your time. If you want. China don’t gives a shit about U.S. stupidly and waste fully sailing 10 thousand miles blowing a billion gallons of fuel to aimlessly flex your muscles a million times. We don’t mind if you to go hang yourself if that is what you want. You can have a million discussion in Washington for all we care but the business of Taiwan is decided in Beijing.
FLASH TRAFFIC: GERMAN ARMY TANK CREW CAUGHT OPERATING TANK IN UKRAINE, ATTACKING RUSSIAN ARMY
This is FLASH TRAFFIC: It appears World War 3 has officially begun. Saturday morning the Russian Army engaged a German-supplied Leopard Tank operating for the Ukraine army in Zaporozhye. The Russians hit the tank with an anti-tank guided missile. The tank blew up. The tank crew evacuated and were captured. The crew identified themselves as ACTIVE DUTY GERMAN ARMY TROOPS.
Thus, the actual Army of Germany has now been caught waging actual war against Russia inside official Russian territory, Zaporozhye. The image above is the actual tank involved in the actual incident this morning, 23 September 2023.
Hal Turner Remark: It appears, on its face, NATO has just started World War 3; using the active-duty German Army to attack Russians.
More as I get it . . . .
UPDATE 10:14 AM EDT —
Details are emerging. It is now CONFIRMED a Russian Army reconnaissance team destroyed a German-supplied Leopard tank of the Ukrainian military but manned with a crew comprised of Bunderswehr soldiers. The Bunderswehr is the actual active duty Army of Germany.
This took place in Zaporozhye this morning.
A member of the actual Russian Recon team directly and personally involved in the incident has stated the following: “When we curbed another offensive and ATGM-ed [destroyed with an anti-tank guided missile] the Leopard, we moved out to the burned vehicle hoping to seize the ‘tongue.’ Then we saw that the crew’s driver-mechanic was severely injured and the others were dead. Once he awoke, the mechanic started yelling ‘nicht schießen‘ [“do not shoot” in German],” the head of the reconnaissance team said.
“The mechanic repeatedly stated that he was not a mercenary but a Bundeswehr serviceman, and that he and the rest of the crew were members of the same unit of the German army,” the Russian fighter said, adding that while receiving medical aid, the German soldier named his brigade and its dislocation site.
The tank’s driver died from wounds minutes after he was found despite efforts to save him.
Philly Cheese Steak Stuffed Peppers
Ingredients
1 pound thinly sliced sirloin steak (or deli roast beef)
8 slices provolone cheese
4 large green bell peppers
1 medium sweet onion
1 pound white mushrooms
3 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons olive oil
Kosher or sea salt and pepper, to taste
Instructions
Slice a thin piece off each pepper lengthwise, remove ribs and seeds.
Slice onions and mushrooms. Sauté over medium heat with butter, olive oil and a little salt and pepper. Sauté until onions and mushroom are nice and caramelized, about 25 to 30 minutes.
Salt and pepper the steak and sauté in a little olive oil until just not pink, about 5 minutes.
Heat oven to 400 degrees F.
Add steak to the onion/mushroom mixture and stir to combine.
Line the inside of each pepper with a slice of provolone cheese.
Fill each pepper with meat mixture until they are overflowing.
Top each pepper with another slice of provolone cheese.
Bake for 15 to 20 minutes until the cheese on top is golden brown.
Back 20 years ago my 8 year old son and I went to the bank. When we walked in the only customer was a lady filling in forms at the bench. We walked up to where the lines started, identified by some silver poles with plastic chains showing the flow of foot traffic. We waited while the teller finished doing her task.
As we waited a few people came into the bank and lined up behind us. The lady at the bench then walked over and pushed in front of us stating that she was in the bank first but had to fill in some forms. I commented that she should take her place at the back, and again she said she was in the bank first. My son looked up at me, knowing that her behavior was rude but he had a glint in his eye. I should have known better.
Silently, without anyone noticing, including me, he picked up the end of the plastic chain from the top of a metal pole and hooked it into her handbag.
As she stepped forward in her self importance her snagged handbag then pulled 4 or 5 poles onto the tiled floor with such a loud clatter. As she spun around to see what had happened she pulled another 2 poles over.
We slipped past, went to the teller and on our way out saw that she had been passed by most of the line and was still picking up her paper, pens and other things that had spilled from her handbag.
On my next trip to the bank the teller told me that was the funniest thing she had ever seen and presented me with a savings book for my son with $20. Each teller donated $5 because no one liked that lady.
One day it will be you.
Twice this week, I have watched an elderly individual, fade into the busy life in which we all live. One man just needed Panadol for his wife but the shop assistant simply said it’s in ‘6’.
But he struggled to navigate the supermarket and as I watched him go in the wrong direction, I left all my groceries and took him where he needed to go.
Today, I watched an elderly man struggle in the heat, who had obviously had a fall with a huge scrape and blood on his leg. He walked past people in the cafe, while he slowly made his way to his car. Not one person stopped. Or looked.
Or acknowledged him. I took him to his car and checked he was ok. He told me he had a fall and wasn’t sure how the air con worked in his car so he just didn’t use it. I sat with him, until his air con kicked in and heard him talk about the old frail body that he is in, that fails him now, every single day.
When you see an elderly person walking down the street, searching in the supermarket or struggling to their car, take a minute out of your busy schedule and ask them if they need a hand. Think about your grand parents and your parents and how pissed you would be if someone didn’t stop to help them. But more, think of them as you.
Once upon a time they were you. They were busy, they had work, they had children, they were able…. Today, they are just in an older body that is not going as fast as it used to and this busy life is confusing. They deserve our utmost respect and consideration.
One day it will be you, it will be us. I wish more people gave a sh*t about them and acknowledged them for their admirable existence and geez I hope someday, not that far away, someone does it for me.
Full-Time RV Life: The Quitting Has Just Begun – Why Many Have & Will Come Off The Road
Notice these trends that are going on in the United States.
Chinese people are consistent with Japanese people, only one enemy is japanese imperialism and chinese national scum. – Mao zedong, 1941.5.15 (This was at a time when Japanese imperialism was invading China)
Likewise. Chinese people are consistent with US people, only one enemy is US imperialism and chinese national scum.
The Chinese national scum includes Taiwan independence elements, Hong Kong independence elements and overseas dissidents funded by the US government. not elaborated here.
The point is: who represents US in the world? Is it the US people, or is it US imperialism?
No other country in the world has invaded the United States. Even if Bin Laden had created 9/11, it was not an act from the military of any country.
It’s not US politicians or capitalist who die on the battlefield, it’s you! idiot! In war the politicians give ammunition, the rich give the food and the poor give their children… When the war is over the politicians get back the leftover ammunition, the rich grow more food and the poor search for the graves of their children.
The US people need to pay more in taxes and lives for the war of aggression waged by the US government. Obviously, the U.S. government has launched a war of aggression against all countries in the world, which goes against the interests of the US people.
Do you think it is in the interests of the US people for the US government to go around the world invading?
It is not in the interest of the US people, nor is it in the interest of the Chinese people, who are simply generating profits for the capitalists of the US military industrial complex.
Because US is a capitalist country, capital controls US politics.
The US has more than 240 years of history, only 16 years without war.
So, Does the US government represent the interests of the US people, or the interests of US imperialism?
Do you represent the interests of the US people, or the interests of US imperialism?
Biden did not tell the US citizens that he wanted to invade China, only “to defend Taiwan”.
So, I ask, how does the US plan on doing that? with some sort of video game competition?
I mean, in order to “defend Taiwan”, you have to have military troops pertorming military actions, aka combat inside of China.
And that’s because Taiwan is in China.
So currently America has soldiers in Taiwan, which is either illegal, or at the very least gray area because that’s part of China.
And the government of China doesn’t approve of that and hasn’t allowed it.
So that’s the current status.
If US start performing military action, that’s an effort to militarily conquer at least China or push them back inside of China.
That‘s called an invasion.’
Sorry, everybody, if you don’t agree with this definition, but that’s what it is.
So US is yet again confirming that it will invade China if China attempts to continue its reunification by using military action.
So this is a very, very dangerous game that US are playing.
George Carlin – It’s A BIG Club & You Ain’t In It!
Lots of bullying stories. Here is mine. My son (autism spectrum, language disabilities) had a chum who happened to be a boy-crazy girl. Dating wasn’t his thing, but she was pretty smart and he liked her and they looked out for each other.
Another boy in the class was a little behind on his social skills, and was doing some low-end bullying of her. Calling out to her “Hey— coat rack!” or similarly stupid things. She was annoyed, but it wasn’t quite so bad that teachers noticed or disciplined him.
Anyway, we got a phone call from school that my son finally lost his temper and pushed this kid against the wall, telling him to knock it off and never do it again. It was pretty clear that regulations about bullying required us to be told of his inappropriate response, so they were following the rule but they weren’t too concerned.
When I told the program director of his previous school about this, he high-fived me. It never would have happened when my son was overwhelmed with sensory overload, so it was a real sign of progress.
China Destroyed US Sanctions Whole Car Industry in Big Trouble
Historic times!
Patrick Lawrence: The Real Threat From China: They’re Better at Capitalism Than We Are
The Biden regime’s robotic procession to Beijing proceeds apace. Following Antony Blinken’s fruitless visit in mid–June, we have paid Janet Yellen’s airfare for another fruitless visit, and following Yellen it was the same for John Kerry. This week it is Gina Raimondo’s turn. The secretary of state, the Treasury secretary, the chief climate envoy, and the commerce secretary: What is the point of this parade?
I cannot but wonder whether these officials are dispatched across the Pacific in descending order of competence. Raimondo, who previously flopped as governor of Rhode Island—except for her plan to cut civil service pensions, an unfortunate success—is mediocrity made flesh. The Chinese must be wondering, with chagrin or amusement or both, who the Biden regime will next send their way.
The assignment in all these cases is the same: It comes down to “two seemingly contradictory responsibilities,” as The New York Times’s Ana Swanson put it in a curtain-raiser last week. She described “a mandate to strengthen U.S. business relations with Beijing while also imposing some of the toughest Chinese trade restrictions in years.”
This is succinct, although we can live without the “seemingly.” Proposing to conduct routine business while sabotaging China’s competitive position in advanced technologies is prima facie a ridiculous idea. But The Times must have its “seemingly,” because it is imperative we pretend the Biden regime thinks sensibly and means well in its relations with the People’s Republic.
Blinken got nothing done, Yellen got nothing done, Kerry got nothing done, and in Raimondo’s case it is hopeless. The final item on her itinerary is a visit to Disneyland in Shanghai, and you have to credit the secretary’s scheduler for the parting reference to dreams and fantasy. An English friend observes that we Americans are doing a lot of blinkin’ and yellin’ across the Pacific these days. Fair enough, but I think it is more of the former than the latter for the time being. This administration simply has no idea what a sound China policy would look like.
What is this all about? For a long time now I have concluded that Biden’s foreign policy people match the definition of insanity commonly but mistakenly attributed to Einstein. These people seem to be doing the same thing again and again while expecting a different outcome. But with Raimondo’s visit to Beijing this week I have to revise this assessment. Those running Biden’s national security policies are unimaginative ideologues petrified of diverging from the neoliberal catechism, yes, but they are not insane. I start to see in their dealings with Beijing a diabolical design to which the Chinese are very right to object.
The Biden administration’s China strategy comes down to parrying, in a word. All the pointless talk is intended to obscure a concerted effort to undermine China’s economy because we cannot compete with it in various strategic sectors, while—part two—buying time to move maximum U.S. military hardware as close to the mainland as possible under the program the Defense Department named a few years ago the Pacific Defense Initiative, the PDI.
At the horizon, we are likely to see Washington’s trans–Pacific military ambitions trump longstanding trade and investment relationships. This is what “decoupling” and now “delinking” are all about. They are warnings to the corporate and financial sectors that their interests, which came first in the decades after the Dengist reforms of the 1980s, will no longer take precedence as the new Cold War Biden constantly denies provoking destroys relations with the mainland.
, the financial news network, that more or less announced the Biden regime’s intention to subvert key sectors of China’s economy. She was about to address something called the U.S.–E.U. Trade and Technology Council and told her interlocutor, “If we really want to slow down China’s rate of innovation, we need to work with Europe.”
It is useful once in a while to have dumbheads such as Raimondo in high positions, because, without meaning to do so, they can tell you so much more than you are supposed to know. Slowing down China’s impressive advances in high-technology sectors was precisely Washington’s intent by the time Raimondo spoke. The Commerce Department under her direction has since imposed a wide variety of restrictions on U.S. exports to China of semiconductor chips, software systems, and the machinery used to produce both. As Ana Swanson reports, Raimondo is likely to pile on more of these as soon as she returns from Beijing.
The Biden regime dresses up this profoundly undignified conduct as “narrowly targeted” to technologies that could be of use to the Chinese military. Jake Sullivan set the tone for all of these visitors to Beijing in a speech at the Brookings Institution last April. “We are imposing necessary restrictions on specific technology exports,” he explained, “while seeking to avoid an outright technological blockade…. The administration intends to maintain a substantial trade relationship with China.”
This is what Raimondo and all of those who preceded her to China say when explaining their intent: Washington’s sole concern as Raimondo imposes her regime of restrictions is national security, and all else can proceed rosily. It is hard to think of a flimsier dodge. By this standard, she would have to restrict sales of Juicy Fruit gum to the Chinese. What the Biden administration is doing comes down to securitizing the economic relationship. If you have ever doubted that the United States is a failing imperium unwilling to accept 21st century realities, I offer this as proof of the proposition.
The Chinese know this and have said so many times. I no longer think Blinken, Yellen, et al. have any thought of persuading them otherwise on these journeys. That only looks like their intent. Their true purpose is in the way of theatrical, and Americans are their true audience: They must make sure we do not understand Gina Raimondo’s efforts to punch the Chinese well below their belts for what they are: an uncompetitive nation’s attempts to hold back a rising economic power.
interesting for what he left out as much as for what was in it. There was not a single mention of the U.S. military buildup at the western end of the Pacific.
Talk about elephants in the living room. The Pentagon is developing the Australian–British–U.S. alliance known as AUKUS, there is the Quad group, comprising the U.S., Australia, India, and Japan, there are these recently and assiduously fortified alliances with Seoul, Tokyo, Manila, and Canberra, and none of this, we hear again and again, has anything to do with surrounding China or providing for the movement of U.S. military capabilities westward toward the mainland. This is only “seemingly” the case, as The Times would put it.
It is the same as with Raimondo’s projects on the technology side: Neither the Chinese nor anyone else in Asia believes these silly explanations, and no one expects them to do so. Beijing knows very well there is a point to all these apparently pointless visits U.S. officials insist on making. The Biden regime is buying time as it remilitarizes the western end of the Pacific. The only people who are supposed to understand otherwise are Americans. We are not supposed to watch as Washington provokes and prosecutes Cold War II before our eyes. We are supposed to watch as American officials—reasonable, constructive, well-intended—make all efforts to talk to the Chinese in the face of their stubborn reluctance to cooperate.
This is my revised take on the Blinken–Yellen–Kerry–Raimondo cavalcade across the Pacific. These people are not clods. They are purposefully malicious and, it should go without saying, are making the world even more dangerous than it already is.
There are two things to think about here. One, the Biden regime’s efforts to obscure what it is up to at the other end of the Pacific is a straight reprise of the first Cold War, which now resides in all but the most important history books as the responsibility of the Soviets. We have a responsibility to render and defend an accurate record so that this does not happen again.
Two, there is this administration’s immense betrayal of Americans as it aggresses in the Pacific, along with the numerous lost opportunities of which American are deprived. You will find in that Jake Sullivan speech grand and plentiful references to the revival of the American middle class, bipartisan unity, and other such elevated thoughts. Read the speech and then ask: What is this nation’s leadership doing in the cause of a competitive America?
Are we redoubling efforts to educate our people or are we, diabolically, shutting down access—see the University of West Virginia—to liberal arts education? What are we doing to produce the doctors and scientists we need to find our way in the 21st century? What are we doing to bring the dispossessed into the economy, address drug addiction, and all our other debilitating social ills? What are we doing—seriously doing, I mean—to repair and build out the infrastructure we need? Nothing or not enough are my answers.
The Chinese challenge could and should be understood as a chance to reinvent America by way of a Great Mobilization, cap “G,” cap “M,” of New Deal magnitude. There is, of course, no more than lip service to any such idea. We are instead sacrificing this historic opportunity to the military-industrial complex, the greed of corporations, and the ambitions of political leaders who lack all principle or any thought for the commonweal.
Maybe you think, as I do, that none of the Biden officials flying off to Beijing is serious about the true work to be done in our relations with China, or is competent to do it. We must consider, bitterly, that they are perfectly representative of our circumstances as defined by a leadership that is more or less across the board unserious and incompetent to meet the great challenges of our time—China merely one among many.
US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has held “candid” talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Malta this weekend, as the world’s two largest economies seek to stabilize troubled relations over trade and militarization of the Pacific.
During the two days of talks on Saturday and Sunday, Wang brought up the issue of Taiwan – a self-governing, democratic island that China claims as its own territory – as a “red line that cannot be crossed in Sino-US relations”. The US has vowed to defend Taiwan against possible Chinese aggression.
“The United States noted the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” said the White House in a statement, adding that the two officials “committed to maintain this strategic channel of communication and to pursue additional high-level engagement”.
A Chinese government statement on the Malta meeting largely echoed the US version, saying “the two sides conducted candid, substantive and constructive strategic communication”.
China has accused the US of weaponizing tech and trade issues under the guise of national security while Washington has warned Beijing against its military ambitions in Taiwan and the Pacific. The US has forged security alliances in the Pacific to counter growing Chinese influence.
Sullivan’s meeting with Wang was the latest in a series of high-level discussions between US and Chinese officials that could lay the groundwork for a meeting of US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping later this year.
Sullivan last met Wang in the Austrian capital Vienna in May.
Why I Gave up on the American Dream
Huawei is full of surprises
Huawei has made an interesting discovery about the Kirin 9000s processor after a recent software update. Previously, this processor was thought to have an 8-core architecture, but it turns out it actually has 12 cores. This revelation has attracted significant attention, as it brings a substantial boost in processing power and performance for devices using this chip. It’s always exciting when technology surprises us with hidden capabilities, and this discovery could have a positive impact on the performance
of devices powered by the Kirin 9000s processor.
Huawei has released HarmonyOS 4.0.0.116 for its Mate 60 series and Mate X5 smartphones. These devices are powered by the Kirin
9000s chipset, which is a new processor developed by Huawei. This update brings the latest features and improvements to these smartphones, enhancing their performance and user experience. It’s always a good sign when manufacturers continue to support their devices with software updates, ensuring that users can enjoy the latest innovations and enhancements.
There seems to be a discrepancy in the reported core count of the Kirin 9000s chipset in the Huawei Mate 60 series. Initially, phone information apps and Geekbench indicated that the chip had an 8-core architecture. However, after a recent software update, these sources are now reporting that the Mate 60 is running a 12-core chip. This is indeed an interesting development, and it could indicate that Huawei has unlocked additional cores in the chipset
through a software update, potentially improving its performance. It’s a noteworthy change, and users may experience enhanced performance as a result of this update.
in the meanwhile … see Huawei new Cloud Service
I gave up on the American Dream|And you should too
My mother did. I moved out at 18 because of physical abuse (beatings). I didn’t talk to her for about 10 years. She called me one day and asked if she could see me. I said no. She started crying and begged me to see her. I agreed. We met and talked for awhile. She told me how sorry she was for the way she treated me growing up. She apologized and begged my forgiveness. She told me of the abuse she went thought from both her parents. Like burning her tongue with a red hot knife for lying. And the beatings that left her bloody. By the time the evening was over, we were both crying and hugging. After that we had a more loving relationship until she passed away.
Years ago, pre-Covid, I went on holiday to Hong Kong with my mother and aunt. I was a teenager at that time, so most of the time, I was roped in to become my mother and aunt’s ‘pack mule’ when we weren’t sightseeing, and they were shopping like no tomorrow.
So one time, we passed by a shop that was selling jewellery and my aunt wanted to take a look. One of the shop attendants take one look at us and spoke to her colleague in Cantonese.
Now, I live in Singapore, and me, my aunt and my mother are all Singaporean Chinese. As such, we are bilingual and Cantonese happened to be one of the languages we can speak and understand.
Essentially, the shop attendant is telling her colleague to not serve us or just show us the cheapest items they got as ‘we can’t afford it anyway’.
Oh geez, I wish phones have the video function at that time, as the dressing down my aunt and mother gave to that shop attendant is GOLD! Not to mention her very impressive imitation of a fish out of the water!
6 Major Culture Shocks After Returning to the US From Europe
The world knows better. China will absolutely take over the entire chip making process, production, business and industry. The U.S. can make some chips for its military equipment. At 1000 times the cost of a Chinese equivalent to fool themselves that they are in charge if that is what they want. That is their right.
But there is no way China will stop till they make their own stuffs. And they will get it done faster, better and cheaper. They always do. The U.S. export control will end the U.S. involvement in 99.9% of chip business losing them trillions of dollars over time. It is too bad. It is not what China wants it is what China is forced into it by the U.S. excesses and U.S. obnoxious and despicable behaviour.
I grew up in a poor family from a small, poor village in Vietnam.
I don’t know why, but to me when I was a small kid, a globe being displayed on the top shelf of a glass cabinet in the living room was the symbol of wealth. A family had that thing, they were rich – that was my silly logic. I liked the globe a lot, but I knew I couldn’t ask my parents for one – because we’re poor.
In my neighborhood, there was a decent family. The husband was a math teacher. He liked me, because every time when I had a tough math homework, I would bring it to him, asked for his guidance, listened and tried to solve it. I also played chess with him. I liked him, because, well, he was nice but also because he had a globe.
One day, after finishing a chess match with the math teacher, I stood there in front of their cabinet, looked up to the globe with my widening eyes. I guessed that he noticed it. He opened the cabinet, took the globe down, then he showed me and asked, “Do you know which country is The land of the Rising sun? Do you know why they said The empire on which the sun never sets?”. I shook my head. Then he told me stories about countries, and the world. All of my dreams were condensed into two things: traveling the world and owning a globe.
I grew up. My dream about traveling around the world is still an on-going dream. But I do own a globe now. A very traditional old school style globe. I don’t display it in a cabinet. I have it on my dining table.
Every day, during dinner, we play a game called Where am I now?. Each of us will take turn to pick a country, then others will ask questions, ‘Are you in Asia?’; ‘You border the ocean?’;… and try to guess which country is it.
Why I Left the USA (Again)
The consumerism here in the USA is ridiculous. And people’s self worth is all determined by what they buy and their social media reels. So sick of it.
In mt early 20’s I had a cute little expensive sports car that I had worked multiple jobs to afford. Some idiot rear ended me and did a lot of damage to it and it should probably have been totalled. Insurance adjuster comes to my house, reeking of alcohol, and decides it can be saved.
Trying to take advantage of my youth & sex, he tells me that he can help me out by referring me to his buddy’s shop to get all the work done. RED flag #1 And that I needn’t worry about getting ripped off. RED flag #2. And that his friend would gladly send a flat bed to my house that afternoon, free of charge, to pick it up. RED flag #3. He gives me his friend’s business card
He then proceeds to hand me a pre-written “letter” from my insurance company, that he has personally signed, that authorizes any & all work to be done. RED flag #4. I read it and realize that nowhere in the paperwork does it state that I have to use his friend. Actually, it is an authorization for me to go anywhere.
I sign it, get my copy and quickly usher him out, implying that I need to call his friend and get this in the works. He leaves smiling. I call my buddy who owns a high end exotic & sports car repair shop and read him the letter. He confirms what I thought and arranges to have a flat bed sent ASAP.
My buddy does the accident repairs, plus a few other custom things that I wanted done. Ends up costing 40% more that a brand new version of my car. Pissed off insurance company contacts me to find out how this all went down. I explained about the adjuster being drunk, pushing his friend’s business, the pre-written letter he showed up with etc.
Ends up the adjuster was getting kick backs from his “friend” and gets fired. Plus the insurance company sued him & won a judgement requiring him to pay the full cost of my car’s repair. And I got my car back in better shape than when I bought it.
I was in Michigan with a bunch of Canadian students on a SERVE trip. Our host, the pastor of a church, complained that when he retired all he would have was “‘Obama Care, like the health insurance you Canadians hate so much.”
I said,”Whaaaaat?”
He insisted we Canadians hate our health care system with its delays and problems. He ‘knew this fact’ from TV and articles he’d read.
I told him, “There’s not a single politician I’ve heard of in Canada who would publicly say he would get rid of our health care and replace it with an American system. Not one. He or she would never be re-elected.”
“Whaaat?” he asked me. “How about heart attack victims who never got treated in time and died? I read about a guy…”
“You have to start reading Canadian newspapers and watching Canadian news channels. We love our health care system. Sure, there are delays, but usually serious cases are treated quickly and families are not bankrupt when they have a medical emergency. You can thank Kiefer Sutherland’s grandfather…”
“Who?”
“Tommy Douglas, grandfather of Kiefer Sutherland, the actor. First Canadian leader to initiate universal health care in his Province.”
“His what?”
Finding True America: Why Americans have left the U.S.
Putin cares about the security of Russia preserving the Russian motherland and it’s glory
He cares about RUSSIA and he will choose his future based on what is best for Russia
Putin has no ideology
He is a crisp man of logic and reasoning
Here is why he won’t trust the West again:-
They are LIARS – They promised no eastward expansion of NATO, They made promises with Minsk 2 – eventually they lie and lie and lie some more.
They are steeped in Ideology – They are insane. The leaders are. They are steeped in ideology equivalent to Hitlers. They have caused death and devastation of millions of people in the name of human rights and freedom.
They HATE RUSSIA – The West hates Russia. It’s as simple as that. They want Russia balkanized. They want Russia broken up and swindled of all it’s resources by the Evil Coalition of the West
Putin may do business with the West in the future but he will never trust them or come on their side
Now let’s see the track record of the West :-
They nuked Japan and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people
They destroyed Vietnam, a war where they had no direct causation
They destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and Syria all for some demented ideology and flooded the world with migrants plus Al Qaeda plus ISIS
They haven’t helped a single country fruitfully towards Independence and Strength
They throttled Japan single handedly in the Plaza accords
China is where the USSR should have been and that rankles Putin
Yet he is enough of a realist to understand that China is a giant and the only major economic bulwark to the USA today
So it’s a mutually beneficial partnership
China has no interests in Europe and Russia has little interest in the South China Sea
They have territorial peace now
Russia has the Military Capabilities and the Energy Resources & Raw Materials and China has the High Intellect People and the Manufacturing and the Economy
Together these two nations form a strong bulwark against Western Sanctions & Bullying & Restrictions
They have the largest pliable land area on earth now and they can route bulk of their energy and trade by land and entirely bypass blockades
Plus China has never let down it’s friends at crucial times nor caused color revolution in any of it’s friendly countries nor interfered with any such country
It’s always been TRADE, TRADE and TRADE
It’s why Putin and Xi are teaming up
It’s the only way to form a bulkwark against Western Hegemony
Get Iran into the picture and maybe Saudi Arabia and that would be a very powerful alliance
Ranch Steak
Yield: 4 to 6 servings
Ingredients
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, thinly sliced
1 1/2 to 2 pounds round steak
Salt and pepper
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup beef broth
1 tablespoon Ranch dressing mix
1/2 cup sour cream
Instructions
Heat oil in large heavy, nonstick skillet.
Fry onions until limp. Remove from pan and set aside.
Cut meat into serving size pieces. Sprinkle both sides with salt and pepper. Dust lightly with flour and beat it into meat with edge of a saucer. Brown on both sides, adding more oil if needed.
Return onion to pan with meat. Add beef broth, cover and simmer for 50 to 60 minutes or until meat is very, very tender, adding a little more broth if needed.
Combine Ranch dressing mix and sour cream. Remove meat to platter.
Stir sour cream mixture into meat juices. Heat through until bubbly. Pour over meat and serve.
This is not true. Since poverty was wiped out in 2020, 800 million Chinese entered into the middle class, that’s 2.5 times US entire population. Half of rural population moved to cities for better education and healthcare. China has 4 times the US population, but less homelessness. Wealth is concentrated in 1% of population in the US, trillionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk, and the middle class is shrinking, many without healthcare. “Middle class” as defined by 96% literacy rate in China, people with basic needs of food and shelter, healthcare and old age benefits.
Russia Retaliates for Sevastopol; Hits Kremenchug Airport Where Missiles were launched
Just days ago, Ukraine fired either French-supplied “SCALP” or British-supplied “Storm-Shadow” missiles at the Russian Black Sea Fleet HEadquearters in Sevastopol, Crimea, Russia, killing what we are now told was 34 high-ranking Russian officers. Now, Russia has retaliated.
The Kremenchug Airport, launch site for the cruise missile attack upon Sevastopol, has been hit by a significant Russian missile barrage.
NO AIR-RAID WARNING WAS SOUNDED PRIOR TO THE ATTACK, with locals suggesting Russia utilized low-observable, KH-50 cruise missiles for the retaliation attack.
Both SCALP and STORM SHADOW missiles, which were stored at the Kremenchug airport, along with the Ukrainian SU-24M/MR bomber aircraft which fired those missiles, have been destroyed.
A substantial number of fire-fighters and ambulances have been dispatched to the airport. We are told there are “significant casualties among pilots, ground crews and even NATO personnel, including Polish troops, who were involved in coordinating the operations and maintaining the missiles.
After my first year at university, I ended up working for McDonald’s, where I made a number of friends and several lovers, and even met my first wife.
I generally worked the night shift. The night shift is quite a lot different from day shift: the average age of the workers is slightly higher (at least when I was there, this was decades ago), and the workload is different.
During night shift:
We spent a huge amount of time cleaning. We deep-cleaned the lobby, dismantled and cleaned the shake machine, and deep-cleaned cooking trays and food prep utensils. (We didn’t have an industrial dishwasher, this all happened by hand.)
We cleaned the grills, a rather tedious process involving lots of scraping with a dedicated tool that was basically an aluminum handle with a stainless steel blade bolted to the end, another tool with a wire mesh pad on the end, and a special cleaning solvent that would take the hair out of your nose.
We changed deep-fryer oil.
We received the supply truck.
We snuck off to make out in the walk-in freezer. Yes, I’m serious. I had several rather delightful makeout sessions with a lovely woman whose name I sadly no longer remember.
We played with the helium tanks that the cDonald’s kept on hand for birthday parties. I will never forget working the back drive-through booth one evening when my friend Henry filled a garbage bag with helium, walked into the booth, and pushed it out the window. We all just kind of stood there watching it float away…including the customers in the drive-through lane.
We played practical jokes on day shift, like stacking the trays the hamburger buns were delivered in all the way to the ceiling, so you actually had to take the entire stack outside to remove the top tray.
At closing, we’d disassemble and clean the various bits of equipment before we locked up. Then we’d go across the street to the 24-hour Perkin’s, which back then was called Perkin’s Bar and Grill (this was before they re-branded as “Perkin’s Family Restaurants”). We called the place “Perkin’s Brawl and Grill” because it would usually be the scene of at least one or two knock-down-drag-out bar fights a month.
One of the “head shakers” about China is the ever-present music of Kenny G on elevators, in supermarkets, in malls, and in restaurants. I do like slow easy jazz, and back in the 1980’s. But I, like most Americans, have moved WAYYYY past all that.
We moved past mullets. We moved past Miami Vice. We moved on from large curly hair, and pastels. We moved on from Windows DOS.
But, you know, China never experienced those things, and have no idea how out of date all this is. And us expats, really, have no heart to admonish our friends in China to stop being so retro. We, well, we just let it all ride.
Just like no one ever says “What’s uppppppppppp!” any longer.
First of all, Fentanyl is used for treating severe pain especially for cancer patients and is deem a medicine product which many countries import mainly from China. Likewise it is your own country laws and regulations to prevent abuse instead of blaming China or Mexico or another other countries. If illegal Fentanyl managed to slip into your country, blame your border guards and custom officer for not doing the job or your judges for not imposing severe penalties.
Just like a simple soap for washing and bathing and you decided to abuse it by eating them as food and then you blame China other then yourself.
I suggest in that case better that your country be pure communist like Mao time where China totally shut off from the world where no exports and no imports can take place.
Would that scenerio be a better option for your country . That covers all your citizens from visiting any countries so that they will not be arrested or detained or even your organs been harvested for scientific research.
The moral of my answer is don’t blame others, other than yourself if you decided your own will to do stupid things.
We don’t actually need them. This is from the US military college. A war with China will wipe 3600 US soldiers out or 50,000 a week. That means ONE brigade a day.
Yes. My brother died last September without signing his will (they had it filled out but he didn’t sign it).
I have helped his widow out with cleaning the house.
Because he was intestate, I’m technically entitled to 25% of his inheritance under my state law as our parents are dead, but he was married (75/25 split by law).
He literally told me he wanted everything to go to his wife, who I would consider my sister now.
I’m not screwing a 60 year old lady out of her house.
Yeah, as a working class guy, I could REALLY use 100k+ dollars if I fought it, but I will absolutely NOT destroy his dream of his wife having a nice little home.
Them home cooked meals, talk and sharing memories a couple times every few months are worth more to me than money.
Maybe I’m an idiot, but I love him and her too much to go by “the law”.
Signing that form for her lawyer was about the easiest moral choice I’ve ever had to take.
CN bans ASML products,Lays off 86 million employees; Photolithography machine turned into scrap metal
For china to make a competitive smartphone to Apple with old generation technology is truly remarkable, I know why U.S and Europe is scared of china…they are simply better in technology.
Russia IS a democracy. Merely because they keep electing Putin and the UR Party all the time or because the election rules favor the ruling party doesn’t disturb the definition
Ultimately Putin IS elected by the people of Russia
The Government under Putin has helped Russia rise from a torn apart and destroyed country in 1991 to a very strong, united force in 2023
So the People are happy and the People vote for the Government and President
That’s Democracy to me
If the US don’t like it, they can go f*** themselves
Next China
Chinese society is 5000 years old
The Chinese mindset is entirely based on the premise that EVERY CHINESE has a role to play in Society and if every Chinese plays their role properly, China will flourish
Under the Emperors, this role was defined by birth and family
Under today’s CPC, this role is defined by ABILITY, ABILITY and more ABILITY
That very mindset is completely against Democracy which claims everyone from a Pauper to a Beggar to a Technology Geek to a Clerk to a Oil Baron have the same rights in choosing a Government
The result is before you
India and China became Independent in 1947 and 1949 – at the same time virtually
Yet China is advanced in EVERY SINGLE FACET over India
China stands before the US as such a feared opponent that the US spends every waking moment on trying to countering China with propaganda and lies and failing
Proof that the CPC did more for China than any Democracy in the history of the modern world
Why would they need this US loser version of democracy
The Chinese version of Governance:-
The Worthy keep voting in the Grassroots
The Unworthy do what they are told to do
Only Ability and Merit matters
One Party, different opinions
Gays, Transgenders put in their proper place which is a ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell environment’
That alone is enough for China to grow
They don’t need the horrors of becoming a Cesspit democracy
Oh SH*T, What Russia and China are doing will change everything, and the west wants WAR
What Russia, China and North Korea are doing will change everything. The massive economic expansion is pushing the West to do some very desperate things. This week Russia and North Korea signed remarkable new trade agreements. It came on the same week as China and Russia launched a new cross border energy hub. Do you see what’s happening?
URGENT: RUSSIA **HALTS** ALL EXPORT OF GASOLINE AND DIESEL FUEL
This morning, Thursday, September 21, Russia announced they are “temporarily” halting the export of all Gasoline and Diesel Fuel.
Russia is the world’s single biggest seaborne exporter of diesel-type fuel.
Their decision will have an immediate impact on fuel costs and availability. Expect skyrocketing prices, especially for Diesel, and subsequent skyrocketing prices on EVERY product that moves by truck.
It is not known at this hour, exactly how long this “temporary” halt will last.
Confession of the Day
There’s always someone who ended up in a worse situation with a bigger loss. Every time I hear those stories, it makes me feel a little better that it “could have been worse.” Hope this helps someone realize how bad it can get before you ultimately end in the same place, with the same loss, and the same need for help. It’s also therapeutic to write it down, I’ve found.
In 2012 I had $20k to my name. Turned that into $100k in 5 years buying American Airlines and chip stocks. Took most of the $100k and bought a house to run as an Airbnb. Made about $100k off that in 2 years and sold it when they banned airbnbs. Bought my own house and sold it a year later for another $100k profit. Invested that $300k in the market around the Covid drop and ended 2020 with about $600k. Then I started with options. The ability to make huge gains so quickly was so intoxicating and addictive. $20k in a day. $50k. $100k. I was crushing it and starting to dream of my new rich life. I broke the $1mil threshold and ended the day with $1.1m.
The next day the market sucked and I knew it. But I had such an itch I made a play anyway. I was down $250k by noon because I broke all my own rules just to avoid “taking a loss.” I finally accepted the loss but tried to chase it by jumping to the other side. That cost me an additional $100k loss. Within 2 days I made it back to within spitting distance of being a millionaire once again, but spoiler alert, I’d never see that number again.
Down $200k, another $300k. I finally had to go to my dad for a bailout. He refueled me and I lost it all again within a month. Another bailout, another loss. I was so depressed and suicidal at this point. It was like a bad dream that I couldn’t wake up from. I will forgo buying a drink with a meal because I don’t want to spend the extra $3 but I had no problem loosing $600k in a single day if it meant I could get the dopamine rush.
Then comes the shame of having to admit what happened. The relapses. The broken future. The never ending despair.
I made right moves far more times than wrong but my losses were always much larger than my gains because I couldn’t accept a loss and didn’t want to further risk a gain. In the end, the money didn’t actually mean anything and it was never about the money (not really anyway) it was always about the high of submitting the order and watching the dollars come or go.
In the end, if it wasn’t for anti depressants and my daughter, I wouldn’t be here today. Looking back it’s impossible to imagine how something could have completely high jacked my brain in such a way but it really did.
There is recovery. There is help. It does work. I only wish it didn’t take losing $2mil before I realized it and finally sought help and treatment.
Don’t make my mistake if waiting and find help now. Also, give the “unhappy millionaire” episode of Happiness Lab podcast a listen, changed my life.
Giving up the American Dream is hard.
giving up the American Dream is Hard. I made a few videos: why I gave up the American Dream, the real cost of the American dream and how to ditch the American Dream. Folks have resonated with it, hated it and everything in between.
But let’s be honest, it’s hard to give up the American dream, especially as a Black woman.
Hustle Culture is not for Black women, but the pursuit of the American dream is tied directly to it.
Let’s talk about grieving the American Dream. content included: giving up the American Dream, I gave up the American Dream, Giving up the American Dream is hard, Hustle Culture is not for Black women, Healing for Black women, I gave up Black excellence, hustle culture is toxic, the real price of the American Dream, Black Women deserve good things, Black woman wage gap, I gave up the American Dream, why I gave up on the American Dream, grieving the American Dream, Black women and the American Dream,
I work as a manager in a Charity Shop/thrift Store and I look having a good search through donations for that special item!
One day, I had some items donated and a handbag. In that handbag in a secret pocket was a Genuine Cartier watch.
I was in absolute awe and was so excited!! Thing is, I wasn’t 100% sure I wanted to sell it without the donors consent. (I knew it was genuine as it’s myself who deals with all the name branded luxury items)
I chased the lady through town and told her what I’d found. She broke down in tears telling me they were her late mums things and the watch was lost for many years. Her mum had dementia and her father was only just starting to clear through her things.
So anyway, she asked me to stay with her whilst she rang her father to tell him the news (he also cried which started me off crying!)
After the ordeal of the day I genuinely felt pretty chuffed with myself. I could’ve easily sold it online for a 3figure sum – but something just didn’t feel right.
A few days later that same gentleman came in and thanked me personally. He told me he’d brought it his wife for an anniversary present. I asked how it came to being in an everyday handbag and he explained that she went to get it cleaned (it was boxed) but her dementia was in it’s early stages and was eventually forgotten about. The kind gentleman had a funeral collection in the Charities name and even made a £200 donation to me personally, which I put to the charity.
So yea, that’s my amazing find
Oprah has no idea there’s a Cost of Living Crisis
Why everything feels so expensive right now.
“The basic price of commodities has tripled in my experience from 2019. The same 1 bedroom apartment I rented in Dallas for 700 dollars in 2017 is 1400 dollars in 2023. The house that would cost 180k in suburban DFW just 5 years ago costs 400k. The cost of home and car insurance is over the roof. All this in Dallas which is still very cheap compared to many other big cities in the USA.”
Beijing says it uncovered US National Security Agency operatives behind cyberattack on Chinese university
Article HERE Second Date’ software used in Northwestern Polytechnical University attack is potent cyber espionage tool developed by US agency, says state media After global tracing, Chinese team reportedly found ‘thousands of network devices’ across the country still infected by the spyware and its derivatives
China says it has identified US National Security Agency operatives while investigating a recent cyberattack on Northwestern Polytechnical University, as its top spying and anti-espionage agency vowed on Thursday to root out all “digital spies”. The revelation came just three days after Beijing revealed more details about John Shing-wan Leung, a Hong Kong permanent resident and US citizen the Chinese Ministry of State Security said posed as a philanthropist while snooping for information. He was jailed for life for espionage in May, two years after his arrest in China.
State-run CCTV said on Thursday that China’s National Computer Virus Emergency Response Centre, with help from Chinese antivirus company 360 Total Security, had discovered the identity of the National Security Agency (NSA) operative or operatives – the broadcaster did not specify how many or name them – after it extracted “multiple samples” of a spyware called “Second Date”.
It said the spyware was used in the cyberattack on Northwestern Polytechnical University in Shaanxi province.
‘Stop stealing’: China condemns US over Trojan horse cyberattacks on state-funded university The report said technical analysis showed that Second Date was a cyber-espionage weapon developed by the NSA to sniff out and hijack network traffic and insert malicious codes.
Quoting senior engineer at the National Computer Virus Emergency Response Centre Du Zhenhua, it said software was a potent cyberespionage tool that enabled attackers to take control of target network devices and the data traffic flowing through them, and use them as a “forward base” for the next stage of attacks. It could run on various operating systems and was compatible with multiple architectures.
Du was quoted as saying the spyware was usually used in conjunction with various network device vulnerability attack tools from the NSA’s Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO). The TAO, now renamed Computer Network Operations, is a cyberwarfare intelligence-gathering unit.
China’s foreign ministry says the international community should be highly vigilant about CIA activities as a new report alleges a years-long global cyberattack campaign. Photo: AFP The report said that after global tracing, the Chinese team found “thousands of network devices” across the country were still infected by the spyware and its derivatives. It said they also found springboard servers remotely controlled by the NSA in Germany, Japan, South Korea, India and Taiwan.
I had an abusive boyfriend. He was great at first, of course. As soon as he was confident of me, he stalked me, tried to run me off the road many times, pointed a gun at my head a few times, cut my phone lines, beat me, fired a gun into my floor pretending to commit suicide (he would never have done that, he only wanted to scare me), destroyed my things, and more. He was military (so was I) and I had no protection. I was able to get him out of my apartment with the help of his best friend and because he was put in a mental hospital for a few weeks. But I never got a break until I was discharged (honorably), moved across the country to a large city, and changed my name. An ex-husband kindly let me take his name, a common one. The abuser knew my friends and family. A false friend who secretly hated me (I didn’t know) kept telling him how to find me and encouraged others to do the same. People thought it was romantic that he carried such a torch for me. I thought he would appear at my door any day and kill me. He stalked me for 13 more years until I persuaded his commanding office to make him stop. I can’t imagine after all those years that this worked, but it did. Perhaps it was because he didn’t deny what he did and the commanding officer threatened his career and his pension. I never heard from him again. In those 13 years, things had changed somewhat.
I went to law school and made it my mission for many years to protect other women who were treated this badly and sometimes worse by abusers. I got them protection orders and divorces. I got their abusers out of their homes and sometimes in jail. It was very satisfying work. I’m retired now and happy to be so. I feel I did my bit.
It will be amazing if BRICS can come up with some gold-backed trading currency. The dedollarization is happening fast. Over the last 20 years, you see the share of global payments in the dollar has gone down at a steady rate.
This is getting even faster now. At the same time, to “truly dedollarize,” several aspects should be taken into account, he added.
“The harder part” in efforts to replace the dollar lies in the reserve aspect of the currency, the Netley Group president noted. For instance, the United States’ big advantage at the moment is the breadth of its bond market, Goddard explained. “One of the ways, I think, BRICS could develop something to compete with that would be the technology to actually link the BRICS bond markets,” the entrepreneur added.
Combining these two things — a stable trade currency and a strong joint bond market — could create the potential to eventually displace the dollar, Goddard also stated. This process could be even sped up with the enlargement of BRICS, increasing the depth of these economic ties, he concluded.
I live in Haifa, Israel, the location of that port.
A few decades ago we decided to build tunnels to connect the north, the south, and the middle of Haifa. We hired a Chinese company from Shanghai with experience in tunnel building to do the work. It was a massive project and took a few years, during which the Chinese workers lived here. The Chinese company did an excellent job. These tunnels have reduced traffic congestion in Haifa.
The Chinese company we chose to run the new Haifa port has a lot of experience in that kind of work.
In both cases, we chose based on objective criteria, not on politics.
Btw, many Chinese students study at the Technion here, and Chinese tourists visit.
China offers subsidies to their EVs in battery making and other areas, heavy subsidies in taxes and waivers to ensure that EVs are produced at a final cost that is 20% cheaper
This makes Chinese EVs deliver lower cost at better quality than many European EVs
Second complaint is that most of the world pays a premium for Chinese EV batteries but BYD and other players pay 45% lower costs for the same battery due to the fact that the batteries are made in China
This is alleged as unfair competition
They want either the batteries at lower costs or a 20% mark up on Chinese EVs that eliminates the subsidy effect
It’s Classic Protectionism 101
Soviet Style rather than Adam Smith
China didn’t do this
When Volkswagens and Citroens and Mercedes Benz and Toyota and Mitsubishi dominated the vehicle markets of China a decade or so ago:-
China didn’t impose extra tariffs on them nor make it unfair for them to import custom made parts by imposing 60–260% tariffs
China told BYD and SAIC and Great Wall to either make similar quality cars or go out of business because the customer needs the best
Thus these companies formed partnerships and purchased technology and leased technology and made a living with limited market share
Yet this competition helped them prepare a lead in EVs and dominate today
However the West isn’t prepared to do the same thing and ask Renault and Chevy and Volkswagen to COMPETE or go out of business
They want to protect their companies
Like US , Germany, France
They talked of free trade when their products were much superior and Asian nations imposed protectionism
Today when they are being left behind, they scream and yell and whine about tariffs and duties
China has many weapons here
China sells 61.5% of the EV Batteries in the world and 86% of EV Batteries today are made by Chinese players with only Tesla having it’s own supply chain and making it’s own battery for it’s own cars
If you want EVs – you need the Chinese Battery, Electric System and Motors and Chargers
The Chinese make the world’s best and most cost efficient products
Even Tesla battery technology is inferior to CATL and it’s latest batteries
It’s only in Autonomous driving that Tesla has an edge
So frankly China for the next 15 years at least can simply ban the export of batteries or impose a 80% tariff on EV exports and ensure European and US EVs simply can’t compete with ICEs
It throttles the EU green initiative
China loses the EU market but critically ensures Russia & Saudi gains a major leverage as EU and US become more dependent on Oil
That is one card
The Bigger card is
China can play it’s own protectionism
China has a huge market for European Cars with Eight Brands having their largest market in China
That’s 157,000 Jobs
China could simply ban the imports tomorrow and that would finish these companies revenue and share wise
Like the Iphone
Intel & Qualcomm openly said if China forced them to choose between the Chinese market and the Commerce Department restrictions, they would have to choose China for the sake of their US stockholders
If China banned Qualcomm entirely today and said “Okay. We will live with inferior phones but you B******* won’t sell or get a fifty cent piece from us”
Qualcomm would be brutally mauled
The Entire smartphone industry will be brutally mauled
The Entire Semiconductor industry will be brutally mauled
The Chinese are VERY PATIENT PEOPLE and they will play their cards very slowly
They thrive on competing
If China simply decides to close its markets to Foreigners except it’s Russian and Global South friends who will sell it all the Energy and Food it wants
Then most of the Tech firms will be brutally mauled
It was predicted that if Apple was banned entirely from China – $ 1.02 Trillion of it’s market share would never come back
The Total hit on the entire industry could touch $ 7–12 Trillion
Who will take up the slack?
India is expected to touch 40% of Chinas present market in 17–21 years (2040–2044)
Nobody else can take up even 3% of this slack
So China has a lot of Brahmastras to use
There will be no more Huaweis
Huawei was a blow
Nobody expected the West to be so brutally lawless and act like a mafia state , like a land with zero laws
Today China is ready
Every US attack has a party from China including the biggest Brahmastra
CUT OFF ACCESS TO PHARMA APIs & Cut off all components needed for Medical Equipment
Devalue US Debt by suddenly pegging an exchange rate of 2 Yuan to 1 USD. China will lose 17 Trillion Yuan and after the peg is removed the rate could reach 10–11 but US will lose 160 Trillion Yuan ($ 25 Trillion) , 8 times worse than the 2008 Crisis
APPLE Shocked! Huawei’s Secret Weapons: NearLink Explained
Amazing technology. Zero coverage in Western “news”.
Chinese wisdom: Wang Yi urges nations to help avert cold war
INTRODUCTION
Human behavior falls into durable patterns of action and reaction/response. Taking China-U.S. bilateral relations as an illustration, one almost always finds that China is forever responding, and that the United States is non-stop plotting, agitating and acting in annoying or irritating ways, resulting in China’s patterned response of rebuttal.
For example, in picking a fight with China, the United States will accuse China of “spying” and/or soliciting a prominent politician to accuse and confront China on “ideological” grounds, making it difficult for China to defend.
How do you defend an ideological choice?
As ideology is value-laden, it was adopted to change a sick Chinese society for the better, by bringing in fresh or foreign ideas that are believed to work.
For China, socialism with Chinese characteristics is designed to address its chronic social inequality and alleviate abject poverty. China’s adoption of a socialist ideology is observably bearing fruitful results, lifting millions of its people out of poverty, and building railways in foreign countries.
But, for the U.S. hardcore irrational antagonists such as Mike Pompeo, China is “on the wrong side of history”. What else then can these self-styled enemies of China do but to use and recycle the “spying” game of accusations, hoping to see their cooked-up situation comes to fruition.
In the following article taken from an English-language newspaper dated Thursday, July 30, 2020, the incidents that happened at the beginning of the Trump era were nearly the same as that is happening in the United Kingdom, which has officially announced that a parliamentary researcher has been lately accused of “spying” for the CCP.
For fear of missing its juicy details, let us go over this article.
Entered Wang Yi Who Called on All Countries to Resist “Unreasonable Acts” and to Help Prevent…
FM Wang Yi called on all countries to “resist” the United States’ “blatant and unreasonable acts”, and to help prevent the world’s two greatest powers from descending into what he called a new cold war.
In a phone call with his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian on Tuesday, Wang said China would take “firm and rational responses” amid the intensifying rivalry with the US, but also stressed that Beijing would strive to maintain stable relations with Washington.
It was the fourth time in less than a fortnight that Wang, who is also a state councilor, has named the US in conversations with foreign official, following calls with his Russian, Vietnamese and German counterparts.
Before that, veiled attacks against Washington might have been made in talks with foreign governments without naming it.
The change in rhetoric and the increased frequency of verbal aggression by both sides has meant a rapid deterioration of China-US relations, and an imperative for Beijing to ensure other nations do not side with Washington.
“Tolerating a bully [such as Pompeo] will not keep you safe. It will only let the bully get bolder and act worse. All countries should act to resist any unilateral or hegemonic act and safeguard world peace and development.” Wang was quoted as saying in a Chinese foreign ministry statement.
Wang said the current decline in China-US relations was caused by a certain political faction in the US, driven by the need to lift campaign prospects and maintain unipolar hegemony.
During the phone call to Le Drian, Wang called for “vigilance against US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent remarks instigating renewed ideological confrontation and leading the world to a new cold war”.
In a speech last week, Pompeo called for China’s own citizens to join an international effort to “change the behavior” of the ruling Communist Party.
“We believe that all countries will make the right and wise decisions, instead of being held hostage by a small number of American politicians,” Wang said.
“All countries will make concerted efforts to prevent the world from being dragged into a new cold war of conflict and confrontation,” he said.
But Wong said the interests of the two countries were deeply integrated – and that Beijing stood “ready to maintain the stability of China-US relations through equal communication and exchanges with the US side”.
“We will never allow a few anti-China elements to overturn decades of successful exchanges and cooperation between China and the U.S., nor will we allow ideological prejudice to undermine the future development of China-US relations.”
Ties between the world’s most powerful nations have plunged to the lowest point in decades as they clash over trade, technology and geopolitical clout.
In their latest brawl last week, the US ordered the closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston –over spying claims. China retaliated – by ordering the US mission in Chengdu to shut down.
The foreign ministry rolled out a 10-point rebuttal yesterday against American accusations over the closure of the Houston consulate, denying that it was a hub for China’s spying efforts or that it was used as a base for its “fox hunt” operations to induce the return of Chinese fugitives. (Source: SCMP)
CONCLUSION
Readers may find it amazing after reading the above newspaper article on U.S. accusation of Chinese spying, and China’s retaliatory response. Amazed because the narrative over alleged Chinese spying is the same, except this time it is the UK that is the accuser. This pattern persists, and tensions go up.
The ultimate reality, though, is that “U.S. trade is still chained to sources in China.” Research demonstrates the difficulty of severing the countries’ economic ties. According to NYT.
In the end, it is U.S. pragmatism and Chinese rationality that prevails, settling the “spy” squabbling.
Ties may temporarily go sour; bilateral efforts will be made, and trade activities between the U.S. and China will resume. Wang Yi’s rationality is right and wise.
The latest visits by high-profile U.S. secretaries starting with Anthony Blinken, Janet Yellen and Gina Raimondi wrapped up the futile spying game – testifying to the law that damaging business ties lead to revenue loss.
Only 100 years?! You bet, will be at least 1,000 years, or maybe, better back to the Stone Age!
And then, you might find one day, your country would have to import chips from China, and the products you use would be embedded with Chinese chips. LOL
The whole Western world, especially the nuclear powers, even later the Soviet Union, had blocked nuclear technology from entering into China back in the 1950s and 1960s. Then what?
The first Chinese nuclear test was conducted at Lop Nur on October 16, 1964. Then in less than 32 months, China detonated its first hydrogen bomb on June 14, 1967. Now, China’s nuclear arsenal is the world’s third largest, and China has, more importantly, also developed its nuclear technology for peaceful use, boasting the second largest number of nuclear power units in operation or under construction in the world.
China was officially barred from visiting the International Space Station (ISS) by the United States in 2011. Then what?
China is nearing its completion of the construction of its own space station -Tiangong, with many visits there already done by Chinese astronauts, three of them are right now flying over us in the station. With the ISS retiring sometime in 2030, China’s Tiangong will be the only space station in the world.
China has been under the tough blockade of Western military techonologies, especially high-end, advanced ones. Then what?
China has successfully tested several times of its hypersonic missiles, among the first nations who have achieved success in this most advanced weapon development.
Also, China has finished its third air-craft carrier, with a fully indigenous design, featuring a CATOBAR system and electromagnetic catapults, one of the most advanced in the world.
And China has its J-20, a twinjet all-weather stealth fighter aircraft with precision strike capability. The Y-20, a large military transport aircraft, the first cargo aircraft to use 3D printing technology to speed up its development and to lower its manufacturing cost.
Similar cases also include the tunnel boring machines, giant cranes, giant excavators, deep-sea drilling machines……You name it. Then what?
China has self developed all of them, not only meeting its own market needs, but also exporting them at a much more affordable price than their Western competitors. What’s more ironic is, some of them have been exported even to those countries who had previously blocked their techonologies into China!
So, in the short term, yes, China is sufferting from the heavy blow from the US, but in the long run, the US and its allies would not only lose the lion’s share of chip market here in China, but will have also to face a strong competitor in semi-conductors, or chips, or something alternative which have similar functions, in the not-too-far-away future, maybe in their own market, and also in the global market.
But during the process, the US would have dried up its influence as a banner-holder of liberal market economy, its credibility as the rule-setter who betrays its own rules, its reliability to its allies since all of them would have to suffer along with the US, and hence, its soft power in leading the world.
Nothing much to gain, but a lot to lose, yet, the US is determined to ride on the self-devastating road. The faster it runs, the quicker the fall of its hegemony.
Japanese-Style Sirloin
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
1 pound Certified Angus Beef ® boneless sirloin steak, cut into 1/4 inch strips
3 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon sugar
2 tablespoons sake or dry sherry
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
8 scallions, cut diagonally into 1 1/2 inch pieces
1 large red bell pepper, chopped
8 ounces Napa cabbage, chopped
4 ounces bean sprouts
1 cup cooked short grain rice
1 teaspoon toasted sesame seeds
Instructions
Combine soy sauce, sugar and sake in a small bowl. Set aside.
Heat wok or electric frying pan to medium heat.
Heat oil, add steak strips and stir until beef is browned (about 3-5 minutes).
Push beef to one side. On the other side, add scallions and peppers and stir-fry for 2-3 minutes.
Add cabbage and sprouts, combining all ingredients in the pan. Stir-fry about 1 minute.
Sprinkle soy mixture over meat and vegetables. Cook for 1 minute.
Serve over warm rice and garnish with sesame seeds.
Why People are Leaving Canada, Top 5 Reasons Why People Leave
I left Canada about 1.5 years ago to travel the world and here are some of the top reasons why I left. I give a lot of my own personal anecdotes as someone who has lived in canada for over 20 years. This video represents my personal opinion about living in canada and why I prefer to live in Asia or other countries.
The main reasons. why people are leaving
1. High living costs creates a low standard of living, especially in Vancouver and Toronto.
2. Lack of infrustructure for transportation which means you need to have a car in order to get around
3. Brain drain and lack of opportunities because most talent go to the states
4. Lack of medical healthcare because most people can’t find a family doctor or are finding it difficult to find one
5. Not much social life /activities for young people, most stores close at 6pm
China, the next war
On China, the US is again lying itself into the next war. The US says “The [Defense] Department remains committed to abiding by the well-established one China policy of the United States” and “this Administration opposes any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side of the Strait. We have not supported Taiwan independence, we do not support it now.”
But actually the US is supporting the Taiwan independence from China, while Taiwan is calling its independent government the “Republic of China” which is a violation of the “one China” claim. The US also admits that the principle reason for this attention to China’s internal matters is to sustain the anti-China barriers in the off-shore China region: “Taiwan is located at a critical node within the First Island Chain in the Indo-Pacific region.” More detailed information on the coming anti-China next war is recent testimony in the House Armed Services Committee here and here.
A spoiler must possess some power to manipulate but this India clearly does not have.
India can do nothing within BRICS with China around (that’s why they didn’t even dare to join RCEP). Modi was left sitting in the corner of their meeting hall.and as quiet as a church mouse during the last BRICS summit because he had no allies to support him on anything. BRICS proceeded accordingly to invite those countries that Xi had pursued.
An interesting thing happened between then and the Modi show at the G20 with new BRICS members Saudi Arabia and the UAE getting into the act. And of course Xi completely abstaining from even attending. Expectations are of course that the G7 countries, headed by Biden, would be there to cheerlead to elevate Modi’s ego as their way of wooing him to their side.
As the saying goes, give the guy enough rope and he’ll be sure to do it to himself!
And true to form, Modi came out with a true masterpiece that had behind him the G7 countries – U.S., E.U., Germany, France and Italy – applauding him on. and the Western MSM hyping up Modi as the new major player to contest China’s BRI plans. This is the G7’s main challenge to China and to be implemented unti its GPII initiative!!
But this plan could not have been possible without the push of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Of course, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have grand plans for themselves – mostly to transition and establish their economy as a major global force after their days of oil dominance is over.
But look at the curious first part of the IMEC journey that has the starting route going through the UAE and Saudi Arabia, which essentially is an alternative route to bypass the Suez Canal.
And then of all places, this very expensive trans-Arabian rail line ends up in Isreal!!!!!
Now, who are the Arabs in their right mind would set up the crown jewel of their economic infrastructure to land in the hands of their arch nemesis to be held hostage anyttime any conflict should arise?
So, you have Modi hoisting himself as a challenger to Xi’s BRI.and also coincidentally, there will be after this G20 a third BRI Meeting in Beijing in October 2023!
The big question is: What are Saudi Arablia and the UAE’s real plans? Are they with the IMEC or are they part of the BRI still and be officially inducted as new BRICS member in 2024?
A friend of mine told the story of going to visit his childhood home in Brooklyn. He had hired a car for the day to go all around the old neighborhood so he wouldn’t have to rely on taxis. On the way to visit his mother’s grave at the cemetery, he spotted a flower shop and thought it might be nice to bring flowers.
He went inside, and found a couple of men playing cards, They didn’t seem to notice him. He cleared his throat to get their attention.
“A customer!” one declared, as if in shock.
My friend said he had grown up in the neighborhood, and he chatted with the proprietor a bit about how things have changed over the years.
“Why don’t you sit down and have an espresso with us?” he asked.
“I can’t, I have a driver outside!”
“Well, invite him in, too!”
After he politely refused, they made a beautiful bouquet for him, fairly quickly. He was impressed with the work.
“How much do I owe you?” he asked.
The florist looked hurt. “It’s for your mother! How could I possibly charge you?”
After a little back and forth, it was clear that they weren’t going to accept payment. He thanked them for their generosity and left.
It dawned on him that this place probably wasn’t a flower shop. But they did make him a nice arrangement.
Something TERRIBLE Just Happened in Maui, Oprah & The Rock
James sues Hawaii for First Amendment violations over ban on public photography in Lahaina “This isn’t merely about the freedom to take photos; it’s about the freedom of the press and the right to hold our leaders accontable.
What are your thoughts on China surpassing the USA
Well, China has surpassed the United States in so many ways, that this question is a tad out of date. China is quite a formidable and powerful force right now. Depending on the measurements used, you can easily map out the dates when the mantel of power was transferred.
Economic = around 2013.
Military = around 1950.
Educational = around 1995.
Social = around 2005.
Manufacturing = around 1990.
Technological = in process.
So what are my thoughts about this?
I really don’t think that China is trying to surpass anyone. And certainly isn’t trying to better the USA. I just think that China is doing what it needs to do to serve it’s people. It’s 1.4 billion people, don’t you know. And they need to be satiated, satisfied, and happy.
China is doing that.
All these sanctions, political posturing, and the general madness out the United States (and it actually is a DSM-4 state of crazy-town) is only accelerating and necessitating China to become absolutely independent of the leashes and chains that the United States controls.
Soon, and I do mean SOON, whatever vestiges of American “greatness” will be eclipsed by a rather harsh reality.
Oh, and it PAINS me to speak of it.
But today, the United States is a lie, on top of a lie, that is covered up by lies, and the only good thing about it is that the lies are so obvious that everyone KNOWS that the lies are simply BULLSHIT.
Today, the USA is a third-rated, banana-republic, ruled by psychopathic morons.
And when history books are written about this has-been nation, it will refer to it as a over-glorified “strip mall” masquerading as transsexual brothel built upon an open sewer.
This is common knowledge in “fly over country”.
Those “Rich Men North of Richmond” really gutted the country, and are now stealing everything they can lay their hands on as they flee the cesspool that they created.
When did China surpass the United States?
Oh, sometime back in 1776. It’s been downhill ever since.
Neocons turn on Joe Biden
Calling Biden a president is like calling Harris a vice president.
In the ADC is a prison called The East Arkansas Regional Unit. Known as “Brickies” because that is the town that it is next. It is an old cotton plantation that has been turned into a hard labor prison. And that is where I was first sent to when I was “retired“.
There, I noticed many, many “gang bangers” from West Memphis, which was only a spit away from the prison. And these urban youth were quite a lively bunch. They were really rambunctious, but kept in line by the older men.
Anyways, there were many wanna-be rappers that were serving time there. And yuppur, this is one of the albums that was produced by some felons from that facility… now out free.
I know these folk. Shared coffee with ’em.
HEADLIGHTS FLASHES – HXVRMXN
Small world, eh?
They would stand by the windows and just rap on the windows for hours while composing their lyrics. And with the proper connections can produce works like this.
I lived in Japan for two years, and lost a ton of weight. I drank a lot of alcohol, ate whatever food was convenient, and never consciously exercised. I lived upstairs from a Genkizushi sushi shop, and across the street from Chuuka Ton-Ton with excellent ramen and surprisingly large Jumbo Bikkuri Gyoza. I had a car, but walked and took public transportation because it was more convenient. After two years of Japanese life, my BMI was 19, just on the underweight side of healthy.
I now live in an American suburb. I track my diet and exercise on apps. I have a home gym with weights, a Peloton exercise bike, and VR boxing subscriptions. I have another gym at work. My BMI is 29, overweight bordering on obese.
I’ve thought about the reasons for this. Why did I get thin without trying in Japan, then get fat while trying to stay thin in the USA? If you were trying to design the perfect obesogenic society to make people fat, you would do two things:
Subsidize low-nutrient foods with a lot of calories, like corn syrup.
Use fear, zoning restrictions and tax laws to keep people away from sidewalks, parks, and “the gym of life.”
America does both of these things.
Due to the peculiar way Americans select presidents, Iowa has outsized political influence. Iowa also grows a lot of corn, so it’s not surprising that American agricultural policy favors corn.
Modern varieties of corn, and especially those varieties processed into corn syrup, have calories but not much else.
Our bodies didn’t evolve to directly sense the taste of nutrients, but they did involve to sense some tastes and aromas that are often seen alongside nutrients, sensations that are a reasonable heuristic for nutrition in wild and natural foods.
If your body tells you to eat until it senses that you have tasted enough, and you eat bland foods like corn, you’ll consume a lot of calories and still be hungry. If your tongue tells you to eat until it has tasted enough, you can consume a lot of calories of corn syrup.
On the other hand, traditional Japanese restaurants serve small amounts of carbs (rice or noodles) intensely flavored with small amounts of high quality protein and fat (fish in sushi or pork slices in ramen).
Japanese cuisine is quality over quantity, while common American food is the opposite. It’s easier to stop eating after a few bites of intensely flavored carb/fat/protein medley than a few bites of bland fat-free sweetened engineered food.
At the same time that Americans consume more calories than Japanese people, Americans move around less. American zoning laws encourage large residential areas with no commercial areas nearby.
Where there are commercial areas, there are huge parking lots which are unpleasant to walk through. Parking spaces occupy the area that a sensible construction would use for walking paths. Japan is the opposite. There are plenty of walking paths and pedestrian-only areas.
Mixed zoning with stores on the first floor and residential units above are common, and possible without requirements for a parking space per bedroom or restaurant table. Parking and highway tolls in Japan are expensive, so people are encouraged to walk and take public transportation.
Finally, American media encourages people to be afraid. Afraid of kids getting abducted while walking to school, so they are driven instead. Afraid of the neighbors calling the police because your kids are outside, so kids play inside instead. Afraid of crime on public transportation, so everyone drives instead.
Afraid of ticks and mosquitoes and sunburns and nature so everyone stays inside and watches screens instead. Japan has giant swallow hornets (so called because the hornets are as large as a small bird like a swallow) that kill dozens of hikers a year, but nobody stays out of the mountains because of them.
It’s possible to live a healthy lifestyle in America if you constantly invest time and effort, eat unlike most Americans and live unlike most Americans.
It’s easy to live a healthy lifestyle in Japan by just being lazy, eating common restaurant food and taking the easiest path from home to work to shopping. Being unhealthy in Japan requires as much extra work as being healthy in America.
Gorgonzola-Topped Tenderloin Steaks
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
4 (4 to 6 ounce) beef tenderloin steaks, cut 1 inch thick
1 large clove garlic, crushed
1/4 teaspoon cracked black pepper
1/2 cup ready-to-serve beef broth
1/4 cup dry red wine
1/4 cup crumbled Gorgonzola or other blue-veined cheese
Instructions
Heat large nonstick skillet 5 minutes over medium heat until hot.
Combine garlic and pepper. Press evenly into both side of each beef steak.
Place steaks in skillet. Cook for 10 to 13 minutes for medium-rare to medium doneness; turn occasionally. Remove from skillet; keep warm.
In the same skillet, add broth and wine; increase heat to medium-high. Cook and stir for 1 to 2 minutes, or until sauce is reduced by half.
Spoon sauce over steaks; sprinkle with cheese.
How I see the US after living in Europe for 2 Years
Brutal honesty.
The Nevada Triangle | 2,000 Planes Mysteriously Crashed & Missing Near Area 51
Most of us have heard of the Bermuda Triangle, where planes and ships have mysteriously gone missing in the Atlantic Ocean for decades.
Did you know there is a similar place in Nevada?
The Nevada Triangle. In a region of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in Nevada and California, 2,000 planes have been lost in the last 60 years.
In this remotely populated area of more than 25,000 miles of mountain desert, many of the crash sites have never been found.
The Nevada Triangle is typically defined as spanning from Las Vegas, Nevada in the southeast to Fresno, California in the west, and to Reno, Nevada at the top.
Within this wilderness is the mysterious, top-secret Area 51.
Along with the dozens of conspiracy theories which include UFOs and paranormal activity that surrounds the air force base, similar theories have long been considered regarding the Nevada Triangle.
One plane to go missing was that of a record-setting aviator, sailor, and adventurer named Steve Fossett on September 3, 2007.
Fossett, flying a single-engine plane over Nevada’s Great Basin Desert, took off and never returned.
After hunting for a month for the plane, the search was called off and on February 15, 2008, Fossett was declared dead.
Later that year on September 29th, Fossett’s identification cards were discovered in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California by a hiker.
Throughout the years, many of the missing planes were flown by experienced pilots and have disappeared under mysterious circumstances: and their wreckage never found.
The biggest mystery is: nobody really talks about it.
My father was born in 1929. When he was living he kept an old trunk with trays that came out of it. In it he had saved crafts that we made, old report cards and a host of other things related to all of his nine children. The most curious to my family were little notebooks. They were too small to be journals. My father told me that since he was about 17 he kept a log of where he was and what he did weekly. I asked him why were these dates important.
My father was a young Black male who was tall for his age, traveling alone, beginning at age 13; traveled up and down the eastern coastal states. He said, just in case he got picked up for just being Black, he would have a record of where he had been and what he had done going back for months. During his travels he worked at a general store, he picked oranges, pears, apples and grapes as a migrant worker, he rode horses and herded cattle on a dairy farm in Connecticut. On all those travels he kept these logs to protect himself. That’s also when he told me that there were people in the world who thought “we” all looked alike and his notes were to show proof that we don’t.
In loving memory of Clifton W. McKnight, Sr.
City Walk. Downtown Vancouver BC, Canada. July 2023
I had a similar problem. I bought one of those tiny cube refrigerators for a dorm and had it delivered to the office on a Saturday when I knew no one else would be in the office. It fit nicely under my desk and I put a large empty box in front of it to hide it, jic.. I then used that for my lunch and it paid for itself fairly fast since I didn’t have to run out and buy a replacement lunch any more.
However, since we were not allowed to eat at our desks, I made a pretense of getting my lunch out of the communal fridge. Drove my boss nuts since he could never find my lunch and he couldn’t say or ask about it without giving himself away. Lol
When I left that company, I sold it to a co-worker that would occasionally find her lunch missing.
The LAST HOURS of El Cholo’s LIFE after BETRAYING the CJNG
On March 18, 2021, some pedestrians who were walking calmly through a public square in the municipality of Tlaquepaque, came across a truly sinister scene. A lifeless body was sitting on a bench, wrapped in black garbage bags, but the worst thing was that he had a n4rco-message drawn with a knife on his torso. The authorities were notified immediately and, although the corpse was in a state that prevented it from being recognized, the forensic reports would conclude that it was indeed the body of one of the most wanted criminaIs in Mexico, Carlos Enrique Sánchez, better known as the Cholo.
He was the head janitor at my school, a teddy bear of a man, under 5 feet tall with the sweetest little smile and laugh. He had worked at the school since he was a teen and was due to retire.
Da Tuk (not his real name) was gentle, kind and generous, a soft touch for a sob story. He and his family had just enough but always ended with too little because of his ‘kindness.’
A relative had begged him for a large sum, almost all that Da Tuk and his wife had saved for a deposit on a home. He signed over a land deed to Da Tuk and then disappeared into the gambling dens of Klong Tuey.
When Da Tuk took his family to see the land, they found a hilly, barren, nowhere-near-anywhere, unsellable plot. Da Tuk was inconsolable, realizing that he had been duped and had lost almost everything.
Fortunately, the chairman of the school found a way to help the family to buy a small house and deal with the costs of their children’s educations. They never really recovered from the loss.
As the school grew, so did Da Tuk’s staff, to the point where he was overwhelmed. An ‘assistant’ was hired but was, in fact, in charge. However, he always treated Da Tuk as the boss and saw to it that others did as well.
For Da Tuk’s retirement day, the Board had arranged for a huge luncheon, and we were all seated, waiting for Da Tuk.
When he arrived, he looked stunned, which surprised us because everyone had been talking about the party and teasing him for over a month.
Then an equally stunned member of the Board made a shocking announcement.
Da Tuk had just been paid forty million baht (approximately two million U.S. dollars) for that ‘worthless’ land because it was adjacent to the planned eastern seaboard industrial estate.
A New American and U.K. Perspective after living in China
In this China vlog, I am out in Beijing City exploring the city and as always, seeking to understand China and the relationship with the West. My opinions and thoughts have changed.
Federal Reserve losing $758 Million PER DAY- Now in the Hole for $100 Billion
The Federal Reserve Bank is losing $758 Million PER DAY paying Interest to commercial banks on Reverse Repos and Interest on Reserves. Those losses just reached $100 Billion — with a “B.”
Before all of these wild financial games began, the Federal Reserve would send its profits to the US Treasury each year; it was usually a few Billion Dollars each year.
Now, the Federal Reserve has massive paper losses on their Bond portfolio and masses daily losses on the money it has to pay to commercial banks to keep the system from falling apart.
Federal Reserve Chairman Powell and company have managed to lose a whopping $100 Billion . . . and YOU are paying for it.
It is difficult to overstate the level of sheEr incompetence needed to have a money printer . . . and still lose money.
Next stop: -$200 Billion.
Woman Over 30 Realizes The Wall Is Unforgiving #19 – When Women Regret Feminism
When Women Regret Feminism is a thought-provoking video that explores the struggles women over 30 face when they haven’t found a husband and feel cheated by what feminism tells them.
Through real-life stories shared on TikTok, the video examines the complex issues surrounding marriage, motherhood, and career choices.
It looks at the ways in which women are redefining their roles and expectations for themselves and for the future. This video is a must-watch for anyone interested in gender roles, societal expectations, and the impact of the feminist movement on women’s lives.
With its honest and open dialogue, When Women Regret Feminism provides an insightful look into the lives of women and the challenges they face in today’s world.
As widely known, Si photonics technology has undergone over 20 years of development. It primarily leverages mature CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) processes to integrate key active and passive optical components, such as waveguides, modulators, gratings, couplers and even photodetectors, onto silicon substrates for processing optical signals. The only component that cannot be integrated directly onto such substrates is semiconductor laser, as it involves a different material system and can be addressed only through packaging methods. In the silicon photonics platform, a silicon substrate is responsible for converting optical signals into electrical signals, serving as the receiving end.
On the other hand, the transmitting end involves converting electrical signals into optical signals through lasers. Basically, utilizing mature semiconductor manufacturing processes boasts advantages in terms of miniaturization, integration, production yield and cost; and employing optical signals also offers advantages such as high bandwidth, low latency, and low power consumption when compared to electrical signals.
Since the introduction of optical fiber communication in the 1980s, it has played a crucial role in signal transmission. In its early days, when human data usage was relatively low, optical communication was mainly used for long-distance transmission, such as undersea cables and metropolitan networks. As data usage has increased, optical communication has also entered the realm of regional networks. With the recent rise of generative AI, the most substantial data generation and transmission occur between AI servers. This is because any large-scale model contains billions of parameters, and the computational power required for each training session is immense, all having to rely on parallel processing and data exchange between chips.
Thanks to semiconductor manufacturing technology advancements, it now takes only 1-2 nanoseconds to process or compute a single instruction. However, the increase in data transmission speed has never been able to keep up with the growth in computing power. Light traveling within an optical fiber incurs a delay of approximately five nanoseconds per meter. Consequently, AI servers often have to wait for data to be transmitted, leading to periods of inactivity; but if electrical signals were used, instead of optical signals, for transmission, the waiting time would be even longer. In this regard, the solution is, of course, to bring the devices responsible for converting optical signals closer to the CPU/GPU/ASIC chips to reduce signal latency, ideally avoiding the use of circuit boards in between. This is where co-package optics (CPO), including silicon photonics substrates, comes into play.
Currently, CPO is primarily being deployed inside switches. It involves stacking Si photonics substrates with ICs for processing electrical signals, which are then connected to optical fibers and put in close proximity to various IC processors, representing the closest and lowest-latency solution available.
In the mid-2000s, IBM, in its annual Technology Outlook, particularly highlighted optical interconnect as a key focus for future technology. At that time, no people could foresee the rapid development of AI computing, nor did they have a clear picture of semiconductor technology progressing to levels below 3nm. However, it’s clear that human reliance on data transmission would keep increasing, with Si photonics technology to play a role in optical interconnect.
At the time when optical interconnect was introduced, it was unclear whether they would be used for connecting signals between chips (chip-to-chip), between boards (board-to-board), or between racks of servers (rack-to-rack). Today, optical interconnect technology is widely adopted for signal connections between server racks and even between layers within a rack (unit-to-unit).
Meanwhile, signal connections between chips have been addressed by TSMC’s advanced packaging technologies like 3DIC, CoWoS (chip-on-wafer-on-substrate), chiplet integration, and fabric. These technologies utilize electrical signal exchanges to meet the interconnect needs between chips.
The next big challenge will likely be signal connections between boards. Currently, the primary approach still relies on electrical signal connections, and the adoption of optical interconnects for this purpose is something to be seen.
The combination of CPO with Si photonics technology provides the optimal solution to enhance data transmission speeds in the AI era, representing a significant change for the industry ecosystem.
The traditional ecosystem featuring the use of pluggable optical modules is not simply fading away. At the 2023 Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exhibition (OFC), linear-drive pluggable optics (LPO) garnered significant attention and is considered a major counterattack by traditional players.
The linear-drive concept involves removing the re-timer/DSP (digital signal processing) functions from pluggable optical modules and shifting the signal processing burden to ASICs (application-specific ICs), thus reducing signal latency and power consumption within the modules. Consequently, it allows the industry to advance product development by 1-2 generations without causing significant changes to the entire industry ecosystem.
This is similar to using immersion DUV (deep ultraviolet) lithography equipment to achieve several generations of progress in semiconductor fabrication processes without altering the DUV exposure ecosystem until EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography machines become available to take over the exposure process.
The generational shift in Si photonics CPO will eventually come, but if LPO gains traction, it may delay this transition. In fact, the linear-drive concept can also be applied to CPO, offering even better performance in terms of signal latency and power consumption.
Beverly Hills is a GHOST TOWN, California’s Wealthiest City in COLLAPSE
Apple is facing a number of issues in China, with geopolitical risks mounting and the economy still not firing as many would have hoped.
But the biggest challenge of all, according to analysts, could be a resurgent Huawei after a purported major semiconductor breakthrough that flew in the face of U.S. sanctions.
The latest chip, made by China’s biggest semiconductor manufacturer SMIC has sparked concern in Washington and raised questions about how it was possible, without the company being able to access critical technologies.
But there is also scrutiny on whether the process being used to make these new chips is efficient enough on a large scale to sustain a Huawei comeback.
What’s the big deal about Huawei’s new chip?
Alongside Apple and Samsung, Huawei is one of only a few companies that has designed its own smartphone processor. This was done through the Chinese firm’s HiSilicon division.
The chip however was manufactured by TSMC.
U.S. export restrictions, which effectively barred Huawei from using American technology anywhere along the chipmaking process, meant the Chinese company could no longer source its chips from TSMC.
There is no Chinese company that can do what TSMC does. That’s why shockwaves were sent through the political and tech world when Huawei quietly released the Mate 60 Pro in China this month, with analysis showing a chip inside made by SMIC.
Along with Huawei, SMIC is on a U.S. trade blacklist called the Entity List. Companies on this list are restricted from buying American technology. Meanwhile, SMIC’s technology is seen as generations behinds the likes of TSMC.
So how could this have been done with the huge amount of sanctions on both Huawei and SMIC?
What we know about Huawei’s chip
Huawei’s smartphone chip is called the Kirin 9000S, which combines the processor and components for what appears to be 5G connectivity. 5G refers to next-generation mobile internet that promises super-fast speeds. Huawei has not confirmed the phone is 5G capable, but reviews have shown the device is capable of hitting download speeds associated with 5G.
The semiconductor has been manufactured using a 7 nanometer process by SMIC, China’s biggest contract chipmaker, according to an analysis of the Mate 60 Pro by software company TechInsights.
The nanometer figure refers to the size of each individual transistor on a chip. The smaller the transistor, the more of them can be packed onto a single semiconductor. Typically, a reduction in nanometer size can yield more powerful and efficient chips.
The 7nm process is seen as highly-advanced in the world of semiconductors, even though it is not the latest technology.
For years, SMIC struggled to make 7nm chips. That’s in part because it couldn’t get its hands on a very expensive piece of kit called an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machine. These are made by Dutch firm ASML, but the company has been restricted by its government from sending these machines to China.
In a blogpost this month, Dan Hutcheson, vice chair of TechInsights, said the 7nm chip “demonstrates the technical progress China’s semiconductor industry has been able to make without EUV lithography tools.”
What will the U.S. do next?
There will be pressure on the U.S. to reconsider its export controls strategy, which was based on the assumption that controls would prevent Chinese companies from producing advanced-edge chips, while the business-as-usual approach would continue at the trailing-edge nodes. It is increasingly becoming clear that this distinction doesn’t work in reality. Washington may look at other areas of the chip design and manufacturing process to enact further restrictions.
Apple’s China headwinds grow with Huawei chip
As geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China continue to bubble under the surface, it is perhaps a potential Huawei resurgence that poses the biggest threat to Apple.
“It’s expected that Huawei will pose a bigger challenge to Apple in China than the geopolitical issue,” Will Wong, a senior research manager at IDC, told CNBC.
“This is because Huawei not only has the same premium brand image as Apple but also is a national pride in China.”
Apple is seen as a high-end smartphone maker and Huawei had directly competed with the U.S. firm in China for years. But Huawei’s sales fell off a cliff when it couldn’t equip its smartphones with 5G technology and the latest chips.
Any kind of resurgence in this area, as appears to be the case with the Mate 60 Pro, could make Huawei’s new phones an attractive option again for Chinese buyers.
“The biggest threat from Huawei is its continuous development in technology, not only in chips but also in new form factors like foldables,” Wong added.
What’s Like Living in China? – Can’t Believe This Is The Same Place …(Chengdu)
Hands down, a woman in her 30’s that I met while staying in a homeless shelter. In my town, the Shelter also serves as a type of half-way house for women just getting out of jail or rehab.
I was “just homeless”, she was on the tail end of a 5 yr prison sentence after she sold her 3 yr old daughter to a sex trafficker to settle a drug debt. The state was in the process of helping her get her daughter back while she finished up her re-entry programs.
She constantly spoke of how beautiful her now 8 yr old was, and what a “fine specimen” she was coming to be. She was quite proud her daughter was “blooming”, and frequently sent her makeup, rather inappropriate clothing and articles from magazines about weight management, beauty techniques, etc. It was infuriating & disgusting. When I addressed the counselors with my concerns, I was told there were “conditions for her release, that hinged on her getting some parental rights in return”.
I left the facility before she did; but I pray all the time that her little girl is safe, sound and being treated well.
What Happened to the Middle-Class Prosperity of the 1950s?
I lived in an apartment building. The upstairs neighbor seemed to think he was back in the dorm: parties all night, every night… people tromping around… music blasting with the bass turned all the way UP.
I tried a white-noise app. I got earplugs. I tried playing music next to the bed. My work was suffering.
Then I addressed him directly: I would go upstairs and politely ask him to please be a little quieter. No dice. I moved through the let-my-frustration-show stage… the angry stage… the I’ll-call-the-authorities stage…
When I couldn’t take the experiment in sleep deprivation any longer, I contacted our local city council to find out my options. Turns out there are regulations having to do with “health”: exceptionally loud noise is on a list of “stressors.”
They sent him a warning letter, saying if there were more complaints they might go so far as to serve eviction.
The following weekend a man turned up at my door. He was well-dressed, polite – older gent. He said he was Upstairs Neighbor’s father and could he talk to me?
Well, hey, I like to think I’m a reasonable person. “Sure, c’mon in…”
He pulled out the letter the Health Department had sent the UN and started waving it about, accusing me of intolerance, trying to cause problems for his son, on and on. He told me I should move out – “Nothing wrong with people having company and enjoying music. I’ve been in his apartment and the music is never loud.” As if the kid would give the old man full blast and prove I had cause for complaint.
I was taken aback, as much as anything because it never occurred to me a 30-year-old would have to send “Daddums” to confront a neighbor. Father wanted me to withdraw the complaint. I refused. He ranted some more, then got up to leave, crabbing the whole way about “How do you have the nerve” and so on. I saw him to the door, and as he stepped into the hallway he turned and said bitterly, “I am so disappointed.” “I understand, sir. If I had children who behaved as your son has, I’d be disappointed too.”
He was at a loss for words. It was so gratifying. 😉
Hal Turner Editorial Opinion
When a country’s Central Bank starts literally LOSING money each and every day . . . countries around the world will start to notice really fast. Especially when there is no sign at all that these losses will stop.
So how long do YOU think countries around the world will continue to accept “Federal Reserve Notes” (i.e. the cash in your wallet) as payment for goods and services, from an entity which is literally Bankrupt?
Sooner or later, those countries around the world will no longer want the paper with pretty pictures on it, masquerading as “money.”
I have no idea WHEN that refusal will start, but given what’s now taking place at the US central bank, I suspect it will not be long.
Now, that paper with pretty pictures on it will still be accepted as “money” here in the US, but . . . . we don’t manufacture very much of anything in this nation anymore. We import most of the things we consume because the Brainiacs of corporate America decided it would be better to outsource manufacturing to other countries.
Those corporate Brainiac Titans never stopped to consider the effect on the nation as a whole, they were only interested in how much extra money they could put in THEIR pockets by outsourcing manufacturing overseas.
So now, the Brainiacs are wealthier, and the country – and its currency – is going down the tubes.
So when you see those corporate Titans, and admire how much wealth they have, remember, they wrecked the entire country to get it.
Turns out, they weren’t nearly as smart as they thought they were; they were just greedy, dumb, fucks.
In case you’re not certain about whom I am speaking, it’s all those “FREE TRADE” dingbats.
So head back into search engines like Google, and start looking up “Free Trade” and watch whose names come up. Then you’ll know who needs straightening out on a personal level.
I just got a communication from someone WAAAAAAAAAY up in the financial sector. He told me this situation is causing almost panic in a LOT of financial firms. He then told me, verbatim, the following: “The parasites are looting the place on their way out the door. They know the jig is up.”
Golden Gate Swiss Steak
Ingredients
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons dry mustard
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly-ground black pepper
1 (1 1/2 pound) round steak, 1 inch thick
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
4 large tomatoes, peeled and chopped
3 large carrots, thinly sliced
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon brown sugar
Instructions
Combine flour, mustard, salt and pepper. Dredge the meat with this mixture, then work the flour into the meat with a meat pounder.
Cut steak into 4 individual portions.
In a heavy skillet or Dutch oven, heat oil and brown meat on both sides.
Combine tomatoes, carrots, Worcestershire sauce and brown sugar; pour over meat.
Cover and either bake in a preheated 350 degrees F oven or simmer on top of stove for approximately 1 1/2 hours or until meat is tender.
Germany Loses Its Auto Industry To China | China’s Take Over Shakes The Entire Europe Market
Chinese videos on the Israel bombing of Palestine, clearly show B-2 bombers flying and bombing the Palestinians. The ONLY nation with this bomber is the United States.
So, the United States is now at war with Palestine.
…
Ugh! You can pretty much figure it out by reading “between the lines” on what the “news” media says.
“Why doesn’t China condemn Russia? Why doesn’t it condemn the Palestinians?”
Why doesn’t it…
…
Never the less, the videos are clear. Those are B-2 bombers dropping munitions on the apartment buildings and homes of the Palestinians.
The United States has entered another new war, and Lindsey Graham is calling for an invasion of Iran.
WTF?
This is so dangerously goofy.
My “Prepper feeds” are information dense with reports all over the globe. The biggest stuff comes from NATO, and I have a video below that goes into detail regarding it.
You know, I was going to talk about my trip to a factory today, but the Western world is coming unhinged. Holy Fuck.
Bought from the dark net, sold by Ukrainian Army represented, donated by U.S. and UK and some US dog nations, paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Hey U.S. taxpayers save more money. Isreal need more weapons now!
So indirectly you can say U.S. innocent people who paid taxes assisted Palestinians to start a war on Isreal. Now you tax payers need to help Isreal defend against Palestinian. Oh U.S. tax payers. You poor soul please save more money as the your government need to start another war in Asia, another one in Latin America and another one in Africa.
Don’t worry tax payers after all the wars sometime in 2100 finally the U.S. government will help you get health insurance, college fees, homeless! But we still need to fund CIA, NED and MIC. I am very sure after spending on 800 military bases and 12 aircraft carriers and interest on 500 trillion dollars debts we will still have some pennies left to help you kind taxpayers.
WHY RETIRE in CHINA?
There are a lot of reasons to retire in a foreign country and the best one I found was china. The cost of living, food, weather and people make it my first choice of any country in the world. This video is very convincing and from an expat that has lived in China for more than 20 years. Living the experience is better than watching it on TV. don’t waste your retirement on the boring life. Live the adventure.
My mom grew up in British Hong Kong, the eldest child of a solidly middle-class Hong Kong Chinese family. She and her siblings are all university educated; all her brothers went on to become medical doctors. Mom left Hong Kong a few decades ago, lived in the UK for a few years and has lived in Canada ever since.
Given this background, one might expect her to be quite pro-British.
However, her perspective is that when she was growing up in the city, the British treated HK Chinese as second-class citizens (she actually gets a bit irate when we talk about this). As a Hong Kong Chinese herself, she felt that the superiority complex of the British in the colony was very strong. She disliked the endemic corruption in the government. Moreover, the colonial government had no democratic legitimacy (for all the talk in recent years of HK “democracy”, there were no elections held in Hong Kong until the 1984, just 13 years before the handover).
On the other side of the coin, the Hong Kong she grew up in had received a massive influx of Chinese refugees fleeing the upheavals in China. The period from the end of the Chinese civil war to the Cultural Revolution saw some 1.1 million people from China come across the border to make their home in the territory. She recognizes that under British rule, the legal and regulatory foundation was laid for Hong Kong’s success as a global financial centre and entrepot.
I think her views capture the feelings many older Hong Kong Chinese have about British colonial rule.
Many young HKers seem to idealize colonial Hong Kong as it was in the last decade of British rule — a golden era for the city where, as one of the five “Asian tigers”, Hong Kong experienced amazing economic growth, established its position as one of the world’s leading financial centres and saw its cultural influence spread across Asia and beyond (a precursor of today’s K-wave).
But ask older HK Chinese, and they will also remember what it was like before that golden era — to be treated as second class citizens in their own city, when corruption in the police force and government departments was rampant and when even water to the taps was only available for a few hours a day.
Steaks with Mushrooms, Blue Cheese and Frizzled Shallots
Prep: 10 min | Cook: 30 min | Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
4 (8 ounce) beef round sirloin tip center steaks, cut 1 inch thick
4 slices thick-sliced bacon, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
2 small shallots, thinly sliced, separated into rings
1 teaspoon salt, divided
1/2 teaspoon pepper, divided
8 ounces shiitake mushrooms, stems removed, diced
2 tablespoons water
1/4 cup whipping cream
1/2 cup crumbled blue cheese
1/4 cup fresh parsley leaves, finely chopped
Instructions
Cook bacon in nonstick skillet over medium heat until crisp.
Remove bacon with slotted spoon to paper towels, reserving 2 to 3 tablespoons drippings in skillet. Set aside.
Meanwhile combine flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper in small bowl. Add shallots; toss to coat.
Heat bacon drippings over medium-high heat until hot. Add shallots. Cook for 2 to 3 minutes or until well browned, stirring occasionally.
Remove from skillet with slotted spoon to paper towels. Set aside.
Reduce heat to medium. Season beef steaks evenly with remaining 1/4 teaspoon pepper.
Place steaks in same skillet; cook for 14 to 15 minutes for medium rare (145 degrees F) doneness, turning occasionally. Do not overcook.
Remove to serving platter; season with remaining 1/2 teaspoon salt. Keep warm.
Add mushrooms and water to skillet. Cook and stir for 3 to 5 minutes or until mushrooms are tender.
Add cream. Cook for 1 to 2 minutes or until cream is almost absorbed. Stir in cheese and bacon.
Spoon mushroom mixture over steaks. Top with shallots. Sprinkle with parsley.
ALERT! ATTACK ON NATO, GLOBAL MILITARY MOBILIZATION, FULL SCALE WAR, VIPs MOVED, GPS JAMMED, UNREST
It wasn’t a pet, but one of our roosters shocked me into a more open mind about animal sentience.
We had chickens, and because of the rough behavior of the roosters toward the hens, they were separated from each other. We fenced in the crawl space under the chicken house and the roosters lived there. The hens and roosters were usually released for foraging on alternate days.
One day I was walking by the chicken house, and one of the roosters under the building looked me in the eye, picked up a little piece of wood, dropped it, and began pecking it. He then looked me in the eye again, and repeated the behavior, several times, until it dawned on me that he was miming eating. Sure enough, they were out of food, and that bird was telling me he was hungry.
I may have seen him doing that before, but I barely noticed it, dismissing it as meaningless chicken behavior. Now I was beginning to feel shocked at what I just witnessed. I gave them the chicken feed and later I released them for foraging.
The roosters were always a little feisty and I was alert to any attacks coming my way, but the second shock I got was when one of them did attack me, and at that moment the rooster who mimed a request for food rushed in and drove off the attacking rooster.
Ever since that day he was my rooster bodyguard, never letting any rooster attack me. I always gave him special attention and treats after that, making sure he had what he needed, and he got to live out his natural life span.
But chickens? Intelligent? Really??? That was shocking, and I had to release my human chauvinism after that. I could never have foreseen a chicken behaving with such intelligence, and I believe we humans have only a vague understanding, if any, about the minds of nonhuman species.
FIRST TIME REACTION TO AC/DC – WHOLE LOTTA ROSIE | SPEECHLESS…
Another reaction. The expression on all these girls are just GREAT!
Of course they can. China didn’t in the past not because they were not capable but because it made much more sense for the Chinese customers to buy foreign chips. China were late in game. When the west started making semiconductors back in the 1960s/1970s, China were still in cultural revolution. By the time the got out of it, they were already too late.
The Chinese government was not comfortable at all being so reliant on foreign imports. They tried in the past 20+ years to create a local semiconductor ecosystem but they failed despite spending over a trillion RMB. They failed not because they didn’t have the talents, but instead they failed because there wasn’t a market. Even Chinese customers chose not to buy from their local semiconductor startups. Why would anyone take the risk of trying out local products when there were good foreign products available?
But that all changed when the US sanctions started. The US government essentially created a captive market for the Chinese semiconductor manufacturers. These manufacturers suddenly got the badly needed revenue. When orders flow in, investments followed. With investments, young Chinese engineers are motivated to join the industry. Hence, a negative spiral down that prevented the Chinese semiconductor industry from growing turned into a positive upward spiral.
To be sure, they still have many more years to go before they can catch up to the best in class. However, bear in mind, they don’t need to be at the cutting edge to do extremely well. Great majority of the use cases of semiconductors only need up to 14nm, which the Chinese are capable of doing themselves. Now that Huawei has already proven that with the 14nm node, they can design chips that perform at 7nm level, that is good enough for 90% of the applications.
Today, Chinese lithography manufacturers can make up to 28nm. They literally came from 90nm to 28nm within a very short period of time. Once they stabilize their 28nm products, they would go very quickly to 7nm with DUV. EUV is a different thing, but even for that, I think it’s a matter of time. I use to think 10 years but seeing how quickly the Chinese are improving, I’m not sure anymore how to make an educated guess.
So to answer the question – can the Chinese be a serious competitor in semiconductor manufacturing? Absolutely. In a few years time, I bet the US will regret waking up this sleepy dragon. Instead of importing over $300B worth of semiconductor a year, China will export their products and crash the global market like they did in most things they manufacture. How about a $10 GPU? Anyone?
Irish Girl Reacts to “Mister Rogers Saves PBS” For the First Time
I went to apply for a job at JFK Airport. I was a Family Practitioner and was told that they preferred surgeons. In any case, I decided I had nothing to lose and went in for the meeting. There were three or four people waiting for the interview and I was the only one who was not a surgeon.
Then the Deputy Director entered the room and asked if anybody spoke Swedish. Nobody did. Then he asked if anybody knew what a medicine called Kåvepenin manufactured in Sweden was. Nobody knew but I saw he had the box in his hand. I asked to see the box, looked for the composition and although the spelling was different than in English, it was clear that it was Pen VK (potassium penicillin V). So I said so.
The guy left the room and a few minutes later came back and told me, “You are right. You are hired. Everybody else may leave. “
Some protested but he said, “I hired him for his brain. None of you did anything and that guy took the initiative and got the right answer.”
I could not believe it. Fastest job interview I ever had in my life and I got the job.
His company was a big international Human Resources consultancy, and their expenses were divided between clients. For example if they used a £250k printer/binder/etc for a job, a fraction of that £250k would be allocated to the job. No problem, but took ages to allocate every time something was used.
One day, he goes to the stationery cupboard to get a pencil. The office assistant asked him which account it should be charged to and for him to fill in a requisition form for the pencil. He just blew his top. It would cost the company 100 times what the pencil was worth for him to fill in the form, with charge codes, client details and so on. It was a waste of his time and everyone else who just wanted some stationery.
The departmental manager fired him for his outburst “Not what we would expect in this company”. About a few hours later, he had requested a meeting with the departmental manager and the Vice President of his section. They expected a grovelling apology and it’ll never happen again.
But no. He went in saying this was classified as unfair dismissal and he wanted £30,000 – or he would go to court. They told him that they were a top HR company with the top HR experts in the land working for them. He would never win a unfair dismissal case and would get nothing. He pointed out that a full case would take 2 weeks in court and as the company was a partnership, every partner was equally liable and he would subpoena every partner to defend the case. He said he might not win, but would console himself with reading about the HR court case in every HR publication. The VP realised it would be very damaging to the company’s PR and they came to an agreement. They paid the £30k.
After that, I asked him, how did you know about the unfair dismissal law? He said that it is true that the company did have the top HR person in the country working for them, but that top HR person sat opposite him and my friend got him coffee each day. When he was told what happened, he agreed that my mate was fired for having common sense and gave my friend a bit of advice.
After my friend left, the company changed its procedures and you could now get stationery when needed.
China’s National Holiday
China’s National Day, which falls on October 1, is just around the corner. For the Chinese people, September 30 marks the start of a seven-day holiday following the Mid-Autumn Festival.
In the upcoming days, they will enjoy the happiness and joy of the “long holiday,” which they have earned through their hard work.
Meanwhile, across the ocean in the US, this year’s October 1 is a critical day.
Federal government agencies will run out of funds previously approved by Congress at midnight on September 30, the end of the current fiscal year. A government shutdown due to the bipartisan inability to reach an agreement seems inevitable.
For the rest of the world, this situation appears to be a farce of a commonplace American political struggle. People are not concerned about whether Washington will shut down. Where exactly is the US debt ceiling? This is what worries them. Can it continue to rise indefinitely?
The US has not defaulted on its national debt in the past, which is why US debt has become the most reputable in the world. But it has now reached an alarming height – $33 trillion! That amounts to $100,000 per person across the nation! What’s even more concerning is its growth rate, with an increase of $10 trillion in three years! That means $833 million is being added to the debt every hour since it crossed the $33 trillion mark.
A nation that frequently accuses other countries of creating debt has set a huge trap for the world in recent decades. Let us not overlook the fact that the US possesses the power to “print money,” which it uses to sustain Washington’s audacious habit of borrowing and spending recklessly, exemplifying its dominant “style” of hegemony. Government finances in the US have struggled for nearly half a century due to excessive spending without proper control, resulting in the continuous accumulation of federal government debt.
In the realm of election politics and hegemonic policy, the US has wasted significant financial resources. These resources have been used to cater to the interests of interest groups and self-serving politicians. Consequently, there has been an excessive increase in military expenditures to sustain hegemony, along with a continuous distribution of funds to appease voters.
Filippo Gori, an economist at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, has published an article entitled “America’s Debt-Ceiling Disaster: How a Severe Crisis or Default Could Undermine U.S. Power,” on the website of Foreign Affairs magazine (April 24, 2023).
The article points out that “because most international trade is in U.S. dollars, the United States can print money to pay for goods that it buys from abroad, allowing it to finance a large international trade deficit without having to worry that it will run out of cash.”
This monopoly advantage, known as “too big to fail,” has resulted in a peculiar situation where the US is “insolvent” but not officially bankrupt. As a result, the US must employ diverse strategies to uphold the dollar’s dominance.
Another fundamental truth is that when the global community thinks about how the impact of this “Grey rhino” can be prevented and begins to make necessary preparations, the hegemony of the US and its foundation, the dollar, will surely be shaken.
China is a significant creditor of the US. The US’ containment of China, particularly through creating military tensions in China’s neighborhood, as well as the overall restriction on Chinese manufacturing and its impact on the livelihoods of the Chinese people, has heightened China’s worry about the US reneging on its debts.
The hardworking Chinese people, who are about to enjoy a wonderful holiday, know that they work hard for the well-being of their families. If their hard-earned money were to be used to prop up an empire’s hegemonic and brutal actions, as well as an unsympathetic political struggle, and then they were to be paid back in the form of “printed money,” they would definitely say “no.”
We believe that hard-working people around the world would share the will of the Chinese people.
China’s new rare earth technology has made new breakthroughs, US chips can’t live without China!
China rare earth insanely very cheap , compare to how rare earth produced and refine. No other countries could produced rare earth with current price .
People in the USSR were allowed to have car in private—the correct term was “individual”—possession.
But we were strictly prohibited from using cars for gaining revenue. Profiteering would unleash on the owner the wrath of the Soviet court system. In worst cases it could be a prison term.
Gypsy cab entrepreneurs risked a fine for the first transgression. The second one would involve confiscation of the car, and an even heavier fine. If the prosecutor could prove you derived a “non-labor” (netrudovóy) income on a regular, “systematic” base, you’ll get behind bars.
Renting your car for a remuneration was of course out of question. If you used a car for example to run your errands as a member of a cooperative, the tax inspection would turn down any tax reports that showed the cooperative covering your expenses. They also would send the case to the state attorney’s for them to take care of your accountant.
Neither could you sell your car with profit.
There were too few cars. Even the few people who had the money to afford a car had to wait for years for a permission to buy one. Which is why it was commercially possible for new owners to sell the vehicle right away sometimes with up to 100% mark-up and more.
At the end of the posting, a newspaper notice from a Soviet provincial newspaper in 1960, “From the Courtroom: Because of Re-selling Automobiles”
The text says:
“The vehicle operator of the Construction department No. 10 in Novo-Alexandrovsk N.H.Semerik bought in 1957 in a car store an automobile Pobeda, paying the government-approved price of 20,000 rubles. Three years later Semerik sold the used car registered in the State Vehicle Inspectorate in his wife’s name for 31,000 rubles to another person, and bought in the store a “Volga” to himself.
As soon as he was in possession of the new car, Semerik and his wife registered themselves in a waiting list for a new car.
The people’s court of the Novoalexandrovsk county prosecuted Semerik N.H. for profiteering according to article 154 p.2 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR. It sentenced him to two years of incarceration, with confiscation of the vehicle “Volga” and the money on his saving accounts. Signature: I. Artamonov, chairman of the regional court of justice.”
Yes, indeed. When my daughter was four years old, she had a lazy eye. She was diagnosed by an ophthalmologist. Eyeglasses were prescribed which she wore for one year. After a year she went back for a check up and he reported that she no longer needed the eyeglasses, the problem was fixed.
Soon after this – maybe a year – she kept putting aside longer chapter books in favor of short easy readers. She had learned to read completely by age 4, so she was almost 6 at this point, she had been a very enthusiastic reader, so the fact that she kept describing books as too hard raised a flag. Also she tilted her head sideways while watching TV. I took her back to this ophthalmologist who said everything was fine(!) The weariness with reading continued, so I took her to a vision therapist who specialized in tracking problems. He told me that she only had sight in one eye – he told me that it would be difficult to get the other eye engaged again, which really means getting the brain working again, but that it was possible with a lot of hard work.
I believed this doctor but still I took her to a different ophthalmologist in a big city who had many accolades….for a second opinion.
This ophthalmologist announced brusquely that her vision has been ruined by me because I had not acted quickly enough. (He would not listen to any of the history that I tried to offer.) He exclaimed loudly that she would never have sight in that eye and then he demanded that my four-year-old son climb into his chair barking: “I had better check his vision to make sure you have not ruined him, also.”
I am not often at a loss for words, but his condemning words were body blows from which I simply could not recover quickly.
I left that office never to return. We went directly back to the vision therapist and I am happy to say almost 2 years later she had 90% vision in that eye and the balance is corrected with a contact lense. He literally helped turn on her vision in that eye. So she has 20/20 vision and all is well.
The awful doctor was the head of an eye institute which will go unnamed for now. The vision therapist had a very small practice and really believed in what he was doing. I am so grateful to him. It was very hard work, but it was successful.
When her vision was mostly 100% restored in that eye, I wrote a letter to the ophthalmologist at the big, famous eye institute and gave him a piece of my mind. Oh, yes, by then I had found my words!
The “national debt”’ of America isn’t 33 trillion.
That’s merely the debt owed by the federal government, which primarily taxes income, and funds with shortfall by issuing treasury bonds.
There is another set of government debt that is completely separate. State and local governments tax property, and fund the shortfall by issuing municipal bonds.
The total outstanding today is 33 (treasuries) + 4 (munis) = 37 trillion.
That’s 37, followed by 12 zeroes, or 14 figures.
How big is 37 trillion, relatively speaking?
It is more than 75% of the combined GDP of the world’s top 5 global economies: US, China, Japan, Germany, India, totaling ~3.5b in population.
It is more than 85% of the combined GDP of the rest, the >180 nations outside the big 5 club. That includes all of the first world beyond the US, japan and Germany. That’s 4.5b people.
America has a population of ~330m.
It takes the annual economic output of a population that’s an order of magnitude larger to repay the debt owed by the American government. Note this does not include unfunded liabilities, and private debt from households and corporations.
This is far and away the greatest threat to global financial security, on sole account of size.
The Biden administration has made it very clear that China must operate in the manner in which the USA sees fit
That China must develop in the manner in which the USA sees fit
In short –
Make all the Washing Machines, Laptops, Smartphones, Microwaves and Televisions you want
Make all the Jeans, Toys, Textiles you want
Make all the low and medium grade components you want
Hell even make all the Robots you want and High Speed Trains, EVs and Solar Panels and Green Energy
Yet at the same time
You cannot go ahead of us or our allies in the areas of Advanced Computing, Space, Quantum Computing, AI etc. You should always be No 8.
You cannot modernize your Military technologically
You cannot pursue your own foreign policy and Geopolitics against our foreign policy
You cannot support anyone who doesn’t follow the Rules based order
You have to buy more Bonds of ours and acknowledge the Dollar as the world’s only reserve currency
This was the BIDEN DOCTRINE TO CHINA
Qin Gang and Blinken apparently discussed this where :-
In exchange for
China acknowledging the Biden Doctrine & relinquishing support to Russia & Forcing Putin to sue for peace by weaponizing the Yuan
The US would remove tariffs on Chinese products, remove export controls on certain equipment, remove 215 Chinese entities from the blacklist and propose Status Quo for Taiwan with no support for Taiwanese Independence
The plan was likely for QG to deliver an ultimatum to Lavrov and for Xi Jingping to gather Global South Leaders like KSA & UAE while US could persuade India and together force Putin to call a ceasefire in Ukraine
The Old Fox Wang Yi likely told Blinken to “go fuck himself” which is why Biden was so angry that he called XJP a dictator
I believe Raimondo tried the same thing, asking China to trade and develop in a direction acceptable to the US
I believe China again said GO SCREW, and DIE.
That’s why Raimondo was so angry when she returned back
Blinken, Yellen, Raimondo all pushed China to follow the Biden Doctrine and China said No each time which was why they all returned back in a state of fury
So now Biden will say the same thing if he meets Xi Jingping
Maybe Hu Jintao would have agreed
Not Xi Jingping
So Biden and Xi meeting is a pointless exercise
There is no US Leader who is willing to ask China to do whatever it wants and COMPETE with China directly and win
Starting in 6th grade, this nice boy from a troubled family was tortured for being suspected as gay. This was the late 80s in South Texas. The boy was caring but misunderstood. Sensitive. Soft. Other kids were non-stop cruel to him calling him a fag and “Terry the Fairy” (his name was Terry) from the time he arrived on campus until the moment he left. He never stood up for himself preferring instead to wish it wasn’t happening, turning them all off in his head by living in a fantasy reality instead, and becoming an angry shell of a generally happy boy.
One day in math class everyone was making fun of him with the usual taunts. Something snapped that day. He put his head on his desk and just said something like [Can you all just say it where I can’t hear it? I don’t care what you think, I just don’t want to hear it.] Everyone just laughed at him. Finally the teacher intervened and told everyone to be quiet (note no teacher ever made an effort to make them be nicer, just, on this day, to be quiet).
Finally, the boy broke down and told his parents. They were sympathetic but ultimately told him to just ignore it.
This continued until 11th grade when the boy discovered that he could get into college with a good GED score (not a top school, but he could work hard and transfer to one, which he did). He promptly signed up for the GED, took it, scored in 98th percentile, and immediately dropped out of school. He went on to college, did well, flew away and started his life.
That boy was me.
Fast forward 30 years. I am a successful man. Yes, gay, with two beautiful children and a thriving career thousands of miles away from South Texas and a life so rich and full I can barely remember any of their names — that’s the best revenge. 10ish-years later when Facebook started I received friend requests from many of those nasty kids I grew up with. Then, it seemed, that because I’d moved off to an exciting city and made good, and being gay was suddenly “cool”, they wanted to be my friends. I declined them and have not been to a single reunion nor do I ever plan on going. My attitude has always been: you hated me then, I didn’t like you, why on earth would I let you into my social media or ever purposely go see you now?!
It got better. My partner lovingly calls me “Terry my fairy.” I belong. I overcame and laugh at it now. They’re all mostly right where they were in that boring town surrounded by the same people, while I achieved that elusive thing: happiness. They did me a favor, really. They motivated me to get the eff out! If you’re reading this and you went to Hobby Middle School, or Clark High School, this post is really for you. I survived. I thrived. Thank you for the pain — it has served me well.
I never looked back.
Disturbing CEO Announcement: Workers to Be Reminded of Their Place
The CEO has many indicators of narcissistic personality disorder. Suggesting people need to suffer to recognize him and his company as an authority over their lives is a major red flag. Everyone who works for him or with him should walk away.
From a western point of view and a few years doing business in PRC, I offer my thoughts.
Over the past 20 years, I have worked with several state owned factories in sourcing raw materials to the US and had the pleasure to meet and get to know with the No. 1 and other senior level managers in these factories. I am assuming, probably with good reason, that these people are all active members of CPC.
They are all good business people and given responsibility for the company management, quite the same as a CEO is selected by a board of directors in a private company with many of the same factors affecting their selection. They have connections ( as in both systems) to get these positions and expectations of success in their assignment.
The Chinese leader in the factory further understands that he is also responsible not only for the workers’ welfare, but their families in the management of the factory community. As such, they all have compassion, and concern and take this responsibility often with great passion .
Like private company management and politicians in the west, some are greedy. I came to know one very good company manager for a period of 5 years, who was eventually appointed to a local government official position (similar to Mayor in US). When I returned the following year, I learned he was to be executed for crimes; he took a bribe for preferential treatment of a private business deal! Chinese punishment of CPC member who violates a trust is certainly much more severe than the West, perhaps a lesson well learned by many for the high price of a life.
I ate, drank, and sang with these people and see them firstly as compassionate human beings, acting similar to those all over our planet.
Certainly the burdens of the CPC on the success of the business that includes the welfare of all the workers and family members must weigh heavily on these people, perhaps more so than a CEO in a western private company who must answer to a B.O.D and the shareholders.
In other cases, I have had opportunity to interact with other CPC members , at a lower level, in Chinese Customs, regarding our trade in China.
At this level their understanding of global trade was clouded considerably with politically driven policies. Like all people, we learn from our teachers ( in this case , the CPC) , who often have a different agenda than politically different viewpoints.
But it seems we all have bosses of some sort whether another higher ranking CPC member or a small business company owner, and as human beings, we react for the benefit of our own survival.
So what do I think about CPC members? Just people doing what they have been taught by others to get through this life.
1. Your salary. I get paid pretty much equal to what I would in the USA ($40-45k) as a history teacher at a local school, which includes a stipend for housing and round-trip flight home every year… but my salary goes further here.
At home, I could hardly afford an apartment (I’m from New Jersey) because I had student loans, car payments, car insurance, rent, utilities, etc.
Here, rent is paid. Utilities are cheap ($100 max for heat in the winter; $10 water bill; $30 unlimited internet). I have no car, no car insurance. I can get taxis (starting at $3) or hire a car (starting at $5) or take the metro (less than $1) everywhere. I can eat very well with a variety of foods, go get massages & spa treatments ($30 for 90min at my fave place, but you can go to cheaper places), and travel cheaply. All while still having enough to send home to pay for student loans…
2. The food. I left Shanghai for a year for another job and that is what I missed most. All the regional cuisines (Hunan, Sichuan, Yunnan, Dongbei, Taiwanese, Xinjiang, Tibetan) are delicious and fantastic. I can also get a wide range of international cuisines within 5km of my apartment (Thai, Vietnamese, Vegan, Organic, Japanese, French, Italian, Mediterranean, Spanish, Mexican, Turkish, Moroccan, Indian, Malaysian, Singaporean, etc. etc.) and, for the most part, are reasonably priced. Shanghai is more expensive than Beijing and people here always complain about inflation, especially with cost of food. However, with everything else being relatively cheap, I don’t mind spending $15-30 on a Western restaurant brunch which includes a bloody Mary or two… (not the four star crazy buffets… they are $80-100)
3. Convenience. You don’t have time to clean your house or do your laundry? Hire an ayi (maid/nanny) … Mine costs about $6/hr … You don’t want to go to your favorite restaurant for dinner because the pollution is bad? Don’t worry, you can have it delivered. There are many restaurant delivery services where you can order online and someone goes to get your order from the restaurant and brings it to you… You don’t want to go to the foreign supermarket? You can order online and have it delivered. You don’t want to go to the store to buy bottled water? You can have it delivered. You don’t want to spend $100s on a new suit? Bring a picture to the fabric market and they’ll make it for $10s. You want to do a juice cleanse? You can buy one and have it delivered to you every day. You can get a lot of things done for you if you know how… And the list keeps growing! All the choices for foreign food markets & deliveries were not around 4 years ago, so the market is growing…
4. Travel. You can travel cheaply in the entire region. You can also splurge on a hotel because the cost of wherever you’re going is going to be nominal. I treated my mom to a private villa in Thailand for Christmas. I stayed at the Sofitel in Hanoi for my birthday. I am a ardent budget backpacker at heart and have been travelling & living in hostels for 8 years, but living in China has given me the opportunity to see many different cultures around East and Southeast Asia and stay within my budget. Only in the last year have I started splurging a bit, and while I don’t do it all the time, it’s nice to know that I can…
Now, I know friends at bigger international schools with bigger salaries that live in bubbles on the outskirts of town and spend my entire monthly salary on apartments or going out to eat… My boyfriend lives in such a bubble with a driver and he eats at the top tier restaurants all the time… I like being in the middle of it all… I would probably be considered rich by most Chinese, but middle-upper class by most expats here in Shanghai… I can`t enjoy top tier luxuries all the time, but I can afford way more that I ever could in the USA at my age (I’m 29)
and if you’re looking for a non-monetary and/or food answer:
5. Culture/Language. Living in the middle of Shanghai means that I interact with the local culture every day. I’ve learned to read and speak enough Mandarin to haggle in markets, order in restaurants, talk to taxi drivers, have conversations about where I’m from and what I do, navigate around the city, etc. It can be very frustrating sometimes, and I know if you are in your expat bubble, you don’t even have to speak any Mandarin at all, but I like what I’ve experienced. I speak Mandarin every day and as a history teacher, I find living and experiencing the changes in China to be fascinating. You can see the impact the past has had on the current government and how the economic changes are paving the way for a new China to emerge… it’s great to be here and experience all of the energy…
I don’t want to know how many soldiers have played with these kinds of thoughts. Of course, almost no one goes through with it.
If you are in a shitty unit, you sometimes start hating your own guys more than the enemy. In such a situation, some people start contemplating murder. If you kill only one teammate, you’re screwed; therefore the only logical thing to do is killing all of them and defecting to the enemy.
What will always happen to you if you were doing something like this is the following;
You kill all your “comrades”. No problem, it’s easily done.
You surrender to the enemy. Still, everything is okay.
Big surprise! You end up in a Prisoner of War camp. Don’t think that the enemy will give you any preferential treatment or somehow recognize you as a defector or collaborator. No one likes to have a complete psycho around them.
After a while, your fellow prisoners will find out about what you’ve done and kill you.
Even the most deranged soldier can see that such an act can only lead to his certain death. That’s why it doesn’t happen more often.
When a person describes heroin withdrawal as ten times worse than the flu, they are doing it no justice — plain and simple.
That’s like saying that sex and ice cream are the same.
Sure, sex and ice cream are both awesome, but they’re not really the same when you dissect the feelings that each of them evokes.
Same with heroin withdrawal and “ten times worse than the flu” — yeah, they’re both awful, but really, they’re not the same.
The first time I went through real heroin withdrawal was in Lancaster County Prison after a ten year habit. It was torture beyond imagination, and I have yet the strength to write an in-depth description on Quora.
One of the withdrawal symptoms of heroin is the feeling of suffocation.
From the last time you shoot heroin, it takes about six days to fall asleep. When you finally do fall asleep, you wake up in an hour or two feeling like you’re suffocating on your swollen tongue and saliva.
There is one thing that helps that particular withdrawal symptom that jails do not provide.
Air movement.
My current girlfriend has two children. The only thing that we ever argue about is the amount of noise they make after I go to bed.
I need complete silence and darkness to fall asleep — I always have.
But ever since I got clean from heroin, there is one noise (that used to bother me to no end) that I can fall asleep to — the hum of a fan that circulates the air.
Without it, I feel like I’m going through heroin withdrawal.
When I feel like I’m going through heroin withdrawal, it triggers me to want to shoot heroin again.
I never want to go back to that life — the life that was really no life at all.
The object that would hurt me the most to lose, is my stupid fan.
It keeps me from wanting to shoot heroin.
I’ll choose my dirty old annoying fan over any other object on earth, hands down.
I met James Earl Jones and his wife in Dubuque, Iowa when he was acting in Feild of Dreams. There was a friend of mine who was a script supervisor on the shoot, and the entire cast and crew were frequently guests at a local restaurant in town called Mario’s.
I went to meet my friend there and met James Earl Jones and his wife. A customer made a racist statement about Mr. Jones and his wife, and I got into an argument with the idiot and had him escorted out. Mr. Jones invited me to join him and his wife for a drink, and the three of us talked about his career and life for almost an hour. I avoided asking about Star Wars, and I think that was part of the reason I got to stay so long.
Every time I went to the restaurant, Mr. Jones (if he was there) would invite me to the table, or walk over to me, and at least say hello and buy me a good bottle of wine. He frequently picked up my tab, and introduced me to both Burt Lancaster and Ray Liotta.
A great man who told great stories and clearly loved his wife.
First, no work is flawless. It’s an impossible standard, so either she’s lying, or she’s deluded.
Second, bosses who try to enforce stupid and arbitrary rules like “no smiling” are soul-sucking creatures whose mere existence proves that they really are monsters.
Why I Will Never Come Back to the United States
“Couldn’t agree more. 32 years ago I met a woman while working in Stockholm that summer. The next year, I left Brooklyn to live in Sweden. The best decision that I ever made. After a good career in the Swedish Royal Opera, I collected my pension and now live in a small village outside of Palermo. No regrets. I’ll never return to the states.”
I was dating an eighteen years old girl, I was twenty-five years old. I had fallen in love with her, but this scared me because of the age difference. I felt guilty that she had not had a chance to experience a lot of life like I had.
She also did not have much of an education having just graduated from high school. I had already graduated from college.
I thought the correct thing to do was to break off the relationship giving her time to experience life more fully.
I took her out on a date intending to tell her at the end of the date that it was time to go our separate ways. All night long I was rehearsing the speech I was going to give her:
It is not you it’s me.
You have done nothing wrong
It is for your own good
Some day you will understand
At the end of the date, we were parked in front of her house when I turned to her to give her the speech the words that came out of my mouth were “do you want to get married?”
I swear I had never even considered marriage and to this day I have no idea where those words came from.
We have now been married for more than fifty-one years and are still deeply in love with each other.
I am one of the most fortunate people alive to have this amazing woman share her life with me
Remember the parties we used to have in school? The little things thrown together to mark the little milestones? Christmas or Thanksgiving or Valentine’s Day?
Everybody would bring something. A bag of chips, a big soda, cookies or brownies or candy.
I used to look forward to those. It was a chance to have some of the things I never got at home. Money was always tight and everything else came first. So I never was able to bring anything.
Somewhere around the third or fourth grade the teacher made an announcement in class. If you don’t bring a treat, you don’t get to participate in the parties anymore. I looked around the room and noticed a lot of faces looking back at me, smug grins from smug little faces, faces lined with nice haircuts they didn’t get at the kitchen table.
There was something happening soon. I want to say the end of the year party. The grand send-off to summer vacation.
I went home and asked then pleaded then begged but “no” was “no” in my home. I guess when you live in an old house with no heat or A/C, no fans or television or telephone, no hot water or washing machine… basically just four walls, the extras didn’t matter much.
So I went with nothing.
The big day came. Kids piled in carrying their bags. The teacher laid the feast out on a long folding table. There was never that much before. Rows of potato chips, cans of dip: French onion, bean and the most valuable of all… nacho cheese. Every kind of cookie, cakes and pies, sodas and big bottles of juice.
I heard my name. Over and over. “Freddy didn’t bring anything.”
Time for the party. The teacher drags a chair out into the hall and tells me to follow her. I sit there alone with my book and read, trying to drown out all of the laughing and slurping and crunching.
That’s what the rich kids wouldn’t understand. Being outside.
Always being the one on the outside.
Strip Steaks with Garlic Sauce
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
2 (8 to 12 ounce) strip steaks
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/2 cup pitted black Kalamata olives, chopped
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon butter or olive oil
2 cloves garlic, pressed flat with the side of a knife
Instructions
Cut the strip steaks in half across the midsection to make 4 steaks.
Season the steaks on both sides with salt and pepper.
Heat oil and butter in a wide skillet over medium high heat. When the fat is hot, add garlic, and cook a few seconds until it is aromatic.
Add the steaks and cook until well-browned, about 3 minutes on each side (remove garlic when it gets brown).
Reduce heat to moderate, and cook for about 7 minutes more, or until done to desired tastes. Remove to serving plates.
Add the olives to the skillet, and stir to heat through.
Add a little water, beef broth or red wine to the skillet and scrape out bits that are sticking, then pour this pan sauce over the steak.
Serve with steamed or sautéed asparagus, orecchiette (ear-shaped pasta) or small shell pasta coated with gorgonzola or blue cheese.
Several, but one comes to mind in particular. (Going anon because he follows me on Quora). I’m going to call him Dmitri.
I met Dmitri when he was in 7th grade when I was to be his teacher. Before the first day of school at the middle school where I teach (which starts in 7th grade) we have a fun hiking day where students get to interact with their teachers, parents can come if they want, they usually do, and we get to be outside. Of course it’s optional, but students are strongly encouraged to come.
Dmitri came by himself. When we got to the top we do this exercise where everyone picks out two palm sized rocks. They choose one they don’t like very much and let it represent all their fears and angers, and then they throw that off the mountain, we encourage them to scream when they do this if they want to (it’s often fun to just scream as loud as you can), and then with the other rock you let it represent what you love about yourself or you let it represent someone you love. We often tell them that they can save it for someone they love. When Dmitri threw his first rock over the mountain (which is in a direction nobody is so no passing hikers could be potentially hit with rocks) he let out the most gut wrenching scream ever, he doubled over with it and screamed until he couldn’t anymore, I remember thinking to myself, “that is a child with demons”.
The school year started, I was Dmitri’s English and history teacher. He was a great student. The kind of student nobody worries about. 4.0 GPA, top marks in all areas, he was very popular although he didn’t have any real friendships, but he didn’t have any enemies either. He had a great sense of humor and was just a very likable kid. He was also a good writer. His essays were always pretty good, although also very closed off. Like he was locking the reader out of the story, he never connected anything to himself, he seemed scared to show that level of emotion. The way he outlined and articulated essays was good beyond his years, but he never made the reader feel anything. Which isn’t surprising, not that many 7th graders know how to make a reader laugh or cry.
About half way into the semester there was an assignment for the student’s to write about a time they struggled to say something. This could be having a hard time telling the truth, having trouble saying how they were feeling, or just any struggle with communication they have had. I see Dmitri’s essay in his folder as he’s sorting through some papers from his bag and go to grab it. He quickly grabs it before I can and says, “Oh, um, that’s a rough draft” Then he hands me another version. Which I accept. But before I go I ask if I can have the rough draft as well. I really like watching the way a student’s writing changes between drafts and assure him I won’t grade the rough version. He seems like he very much wants to say no, but he was a very passive kid and he so he agreed.
I’m grading papers that night and first read his final version. Pretty much what I was expecting, a well written, well organized introspective essay regarding when you should tell the truth to preserve somebodies feelings and when honesty is more important. It’s ideas were deep, but he did a weak job connecting it back to his own life. Then I read the rough draft. It was on a completely different topic and blew my mind. It wasn’t organized or planned, I don’t think Dmitri outlined it first and it seems like he wrote it without the intention of it being read. It seemed more like something he did for himself therapeutically.
The essay was about his older brother who had died of a drug overdose when Dmitri was 9 and his brother was 15 (this is not something I had known about). He talked about how difficult it became to talk to people after that. One quote that really stayed with me, taken directly from the essay, was “At the funeral everyone felt the need to talk to me. They gave me their condolences and told me it would be okay even when it clearly wouldn’t be. I wanted them to go away and shut up and just let me be alone with silence. After the funeral, after all the thoughts and prayers were out of the way, everyone faded into the background. They were so worried they’d say the wrong thing that they chose to say nothing at all. With a mother who had collapsed into herself I was left alone with a dead older brother and I ended up resenting the silence I had searched for at the funeral. I looked for [brother’s name] everywhere. In his room, on the trails we used to hike, in the medical examiners toxicology report. All I found was a stranger who I felt I had no right to grieve” Dmitri went on to talk about how after his brother’s death he had become obsessed with the police investigation into where his brother had gotten the drugs. Because, as Dmitri put it, he wanted someone to blame. He blamed himself for not knowing about his brother’s use, and his brother for using, and he just wanted someone who wasn’t him or his brother to blame. To quote another part of his essay “They never found the dealer and it took me over a year to realize it didn’t matter. I wanted them to because then it wouldn’t be [brother’s name]’s fault for doing drugs, or mine for not knowing he was doing them, it’d be all the dealers fault for giving them to him”.
It was, without a doubt, the best student writing I’d ever read. It made me cry, in parts it even made me laugh.
I talked to Dmitri about it.
He broke down in the conversation and said he hadn’t actually talked to anyone about his brother in over a year. We talked for awhile.
At the end of the semester I found a little box with a note from Dmitri. The note read: “I wasn’t sure what this was supposed to represent. There were no parts of myself I particularly liked and no one I felt comfortable declaring a love for, even if the declaration was a private one. Thank you for showing me the parts of myself it could be and for showing me what a healthy relationship is. You’re the person I was meant to give this to” Inside the box was his rock from the start of year hike. I’ve kept it for the passed 3 years, it’s the most thoughtful student gift I could have asked for.
I’ve loved continuing to get to know Dmitri. He’s in 10th grade now and with his intellect combined with one of hell of a work ethic and his determination to be the first in his family to graduate college, I’m quite certain he has a big future ahead of him.
I am 60 and my husband is 67. In May we adopted a 16 year old young man. He moved in with us the January before his 15th birthday. The people he called mom and dad had just died. His biological mother did not want him and he never met his bio dad. We spent the year doing a TPR terminating parental rights. Once it was done, we adopted him. He is very shy and was never given anything as his parents were both on Medicaid. We have been able to introduce him to all sorts of things that the world has to offer. We went from being empty nesters for 10 years to having a teen. Sometimes I think he might be better with younger parents, but we give our undivided attention and he has our love and support, no abuse and a future.
i am risking EVERYTHING to share this with you!
Since he left FOX, he has been on fire.
A man with Cancer
I took care of an elderly man who had cancer. He lived Next door to me. I hardly knew him but asked about his health after not seeing him over the winter, he had lost 50 pounds and the doctor didn’t know what was wrong with him. So I volunteered to have him checked out and sure enough, he had malignant cancer. His family lived across country and didn’t want anything to do with him. Or his health. So I stepped in. The next 3 years we went through chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant. See, his family were Roman Catholic, and I believe he was gay, although we never discussed it. They felt he was a sinner and abandoned him. It was sad. I mean Really sad, and since I lived next door, I stood at my kitchen window and kept an eye on the house when I was trying to give him quiet. We moved his bedroom to the living room, where he could sleep and I could look through the window to make sure he was alright. One day he attempted to cook and fortunately I saw the fire! I put it out and never let him cook again, which is when I took on his nourishment needs, although he could barely eat. Thus became my life. I found out he never had a birthday party, so I had my family come with gifts and cards. He was elated!
When he finally did pass away, he had left me his house and his corvette. His family was furious, although they were very well off.
when I had him buried in his family plot, I bought a gorgeous headstone for him. The family had the management of the cemetery sledge hammer it to destroy all memories. I was heartbroken and really pissed off. The next time I went to the cemetery the manager said , “Well I had the opportunity to speak to the family, and I see you were right, they are awful people!” When I went to visit one day, it was early evening and it was snowing so softly, and as I was leaving an ENTIRE herd of deer stood up and looked at me. They didn’t leave, they weren’t frightened, they just stood there staring at me.
I knew right then and there that he was happy safe. His family doomed him to hell, but that is not where he was! My heart grew and I was able to replace my tears with a smile. Moral of this long story is this; it doesn’t matter what material things you have in life, take care of those who cannot take care of themselves. Be there for people who need you, whether it is family or a neighbor. It helps your soul to know you did the right thing.
Last thing, when he left me his house and car in his will, he stipulated that his family get $7,000. This way they had no recourse to fight me. I mailed his dress uniform from when he was a marine, his dog tags and many more items a normal family would want. They refused delivery and had it returned. his house wasn’t worth much, but I sold it when the market bottomed out and put in a few kitchen and bathroom remodeling.
I will never forget him. There is a shadow box in my home with pictures, dog tags and coins from around the world, even a picture of him riding a camel on vacation. The bulk of his money went to Karmanos cancer society. I do not regret one moment of those 3 years. Remember, be there for the people who have no one. It’s what you DO not what you have. Thx for reading this long story.
EDIT; this is for the woman who said it was a “weird, sensational tale of fiction “ This was all 100% true. The management of the cemetery destroyed the headstone because it was a FAMILY plot, and the Family had the right to decide what was on it. I complained vehemently and was refunded the money I spent on the headstone. It was afterwards that the management conversed with the family and found them crass and rude. There is nothing I can do about your comment, except to say sorry you didn’t understood what my post meant to me. So many others did.
The Living Dead: The Most Disturbing Story From 9/11
At 08:46 (EDT), hijackers crashed American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Centre’s North Tower. It wasn’t long after that firefighters and emergency medical specialists were dispatched to deal with the multitude of distress calls they received from people trapped within the burning building. One such medical specialist dispatched that day was Ernest Armstead, a veteran with over 30 years of experience. In this video, I will attempt to retell the horrific experience Ernest witnessed that day.
During the time after I was released from the Navy, my wife and I were on our “in between time”, our “great adventure. This was a very pitiful time. We were extraordinarily poor, living in a van and searching for work.
There was an event during this time that I want to relate.
We had collected something like sixty cents, and used it to buy a can of spam and a loaf of discount old bread. It is amazing what you can find if you check all the payphones, the creeks, and the various cracks in sidewalks.
So we ended up buying some FOOD!
And with these two items, we hiked quite a distance to the nearest park that had grills. It took us about an hour and a half to get there.
And we went to the end of the park, where no one was there. It was empty. And so we collected wood, and lit a fire in the metal grill.
There, we proceeded to grill our spam, and make sandwiches.
Sure as shit…
…one hundred empty picnic tables…
…and a guy and a girl and their big humongous German Shepard dog, went to the table directly next to us and just watched us glaring. Obviously wanting us to have sympathy for them , and give them some of our food.
No fucking way!
We (ourselves) hadn’t eaten in two weeks. This was our food.
NOT NOT NOT going to give it to some well-fed strangers and their fucking gigantic dog.
We turned our backs to them, and scarfed up all the sandwiches for ourselves. One entire loaf, ten or so sandwiches. Six for me, four for my wife.
Not a crumb was left over.
And when they saw us eat it all; so that there was nothing left, they got up and left… just like that. No need to stick around.
Assholes.
…
Experience hardens you. And at that time, I was in no mood for moochers.
We live life on our own terms. You should as well.
Can I help the roughly 5% of world’s population of the conservative, older, less read less travelled, more hubris older xenophobic racist Caucasians, many are here in QUORA understand what this news is creating such a huge buzz.
You see the neocon whom you see as god, says to all of you that China will be dead if U.S. prevented China from getting 14 nanometer chips and 5G chips. So a sick Biden buy this shit too! He and these sick neocons thought China will need a generation to make these chips themselves. So they thought that China is fxxked!
They picked Huawei to fxxked China up! In a mere 3 years China has not only make Huawei Mate 60 lunched without fanfare, a full 5G, a full satellite ready, wakkie -talkie ready phone using 7 nanometer Chinese chips and killing off a bunch of U.S. technologies that tried and failed to convinced the sick administration that CHINA could get it done in 5 years at most. They are right, all of them did not foresee China needed just 3 years!
Those who open up Huawei mate 60 are totally shocking to see China successfully overcome the U.S. chip bans 10 years ahead! And for good measure. 100 million Chinese booked with deposit this phone that can work under water! one or two US companies that potentially lost everything is totally shocked. And its stock hammered in the market seeing China replacing their product easily!
Old Southern Date Cake
This is a vintage recipe which is well over 100 years old.
Ingredients
1 cup sugar
1 cup flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 packages seeded dates
3 eggs, beaten
1 quart (4 cups) pecans
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Instructions
Heat oven to 275 degrees F. Grease a loaf pan.
Combine ingredients except pecans and vanilla extract; mix well.
Add pecans and vanilla extract.
Bake for 1 hour.
Lahaina (part 1)
From an obscure portion of you-tube. Worth your time to watch.
To deal with the challenges of an ageing and decreasing population, Beijing in 2021 announced that couples can have up to three children. The policy shift followed a major change in 2016, when Beijing ended the decades-old one-child policy, allowing couples to have two children.
Many local governments have issued cash incentives and other preferential policies. Couples in Shenzhen who have a third child will be eligible for a cash allowance of 19,000 yuan (US$2,800) until the child turns three years old. Jinan, a city in Shandong province, is offering childcare subsidies and increasing parental leave. In July 2021, Panzhihua in Sichuan province became the first city in China to offer subsidies to help families raise more children – a monthly allowance of 500 yuan per second or third child up to the age of three.
Many of China’s migrant workers will no longer have to travel back to their hometowns to get married under new rules. In 2023, the State Council, China’s cabinet, approved a regulation allowing people from 21 provinces and municipalities – mostly in eastern and central China such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong and Zhejiang – to register their marriage where their residence permits were issued. Previously, a prospective bride and groom had to return to the city or country of their hukou, or household registration, to register for marriage.
China in 2022 confirmed that it would delay retirement ages – 60 for men, 55 for female office workers, and 50 for female blue-collar workers – from 2025.
In Sichuan province, unmarried individuals will now be allowed to register the birth of their children, whereas previously only married women were legally permitted to do so.
China’s family-planning agency says it will “intervene” when unmarried women and teenagers seek abortions, and will promote traditional values to encourage people to have more children.
Well, Mr. Musk may be a fine engineer, and perhaps even a fine businessman, but I’m not really in a good position to judge that.
He is, however, not a lawyer, nor does he know much about the law.
In this case, the ADL monitors lots of social media to see how effectively they monitor anti-Semitic content on their platform. This sort of content clearly violates the terms of service of any legitimate social media site (so, anything apart from 4chan) and is actively illegal in many countries where companies can be fined for not policing it (most notably Germany, where it’s illegal to post Holocaust denial material).
ADL publicizes its results and noted that anti-Semitic content on Twitter/X has risen sharply since Mr. Musk bought the platform and started changing the way it moderated content. For example, they would note that someone would post content that was clearly out of bounds by Twitter/X’s own standards, the person would be “banned”, then the ban would soon be lifted and the content restored.
Mr. Musk is right that claiming someone is anti-Semitic is defamatory. Whether the ADL did that is arguable, but they never did so explicitly, they just implied Twitter/X didn’t seem to care about such content on its platform.
Mr. Musk has also been losing advertising revenue, and he is right that organizations like ADL have a lot of clout when it comes to the decisions advertisers make about which platform to use.
But there are massive holes in Mr. Musk’s case. First, even if what the ADL did was defamatory, they’re most likely protected by justification (what they posted was true), fair comment (on newsworthy subjects, you’re allowed to point out obvious conclusions from data, even if it stretches things a bit), and the public figure malice requirement (when you’re famous, like Musk and Twitter/X, and engage in political discussion, the burden goes beyond “falsity” to “the person who published the defamatory content knew it was false or was reckless about its accuracy).
Also, there’s the question of damages. Blaming ADL for the loss of all the advertising revenue is a stretch. Moreover one of the key rules in defamation is that since it’s about your character, you actually have to have one to defame. If your name is mud, someone piling on bad statements about you doesn’t actually damage your reputation if you don’t have one.
Musk is treading on dangerous ground because most U.S. jurisdictions now have what are called “Anti-SLAPP” provisions – “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation”. In a nutshell, if you sue someone who is making a valid criticism in order to try to get them to stop, the suit can be dismissed at an early stage and you’re on the hook for the costs of defending and dismissing the lawsuit in full. This proposed suit would be a perfect example. The JDL has loads of arguable defences and it’s clear that their criticism was in the public interest.
Marshal Ney was one of the 18 Marshals of Napoleon. He was specially known for his extraordinary Courage, sometimes bordering on foolhardiness. .
During Napoleon’s retreat from Russia, his divison was cut off from the main army by the Russian forces. He angrily rejected all offers to surrender, and led a forced marched at night in a heavy fog over the Dnieper River, over heavy enemy fire and finally managed to rejoin with the main army . It is said that he was the last to leave the Russian soil. For his actions Napoleon called him “the bravest of the brave!“.
After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, he was charged for treason.
On 7 December 1815 , he was brought in front of a firing squad.
He refused to wear a blindfold and was allowed the right to give the order to fire, reportedly saying:
Soldiers, when I give the command to fire, fire straight at my heart. Wait for the order. It will be my last to you. I protest against my condemnation. I have fought a hundred battles for France, and not one against her … Soldiers, fire!
Butch gives Tony the OK on Phil
Butch DeConcini and Albie Cianfalone arrange a sit down with Tony and Paulie, where they express their dissatisfaction with Phil’s leadership and agree to a ceasefire of the war. Butchie says he will not reveal the location of Phil, but then says “You do what you got to do.”
The move to ban Apple Iphone for Government Officials is a drop in the bucket
We are talking maybe 800,000 Phones tops
Already most Govt Officials don’t buy the Iphone without any orders as a default
That’s not the problem
The problem is that the Mainlanders are ANGRY as hell with the West
In fact they are angry at the CPC for apparently welcoming Yellen and Raimondo and Blinken in the first place at all
The Mate 60 is likely to affect between 15–20% of Iphones market
It is said that 131 Million Orders have been placed for the Mate 60 which means at least 40 Million Orders are from those who would have purchased an Iphone 15 on September 12th
No way they will spend 16000 Yuan on 2 phones, so they definitely won’t be buying the Iphone 15
A Combination of Hype, Quality and Nationalism has led to Huawei taking a huge number of orders and Apple potentially losing out on a number of them
Apple has a $ 80 Billion market in China and a 20% Hit is $ 16 Billion
That’s a lot of money
Qualcomm also has a problem
Roughly 220 Million Units were ordered in 2023 but in 2024 it’s expected that Qualcomm would lose orders to Huawei/Partner by local players
Add to this the fact that Mediatek is fast rising it’s market share in China, that’s another estimated 9–13 Million Units or $ 1.62 – $ 2.35 Billion (Mediatek is Taiwanese)
So on the whole that’s a blow of $ 13 -14 Billion for the US Semiconductor Industry in revenue
No Nation on earth can compensate that loss of revenue
So China isn’t planning to ban the Iphone, just the Iphone for officials
The key is Iphone will face a wave of anger, nationalism and a comparable proud made in China product
That will cause it many problems in China
Samsung, Nike, Carrefour, Sony, Nikon, Fujitsu all lost their market share not due to bans or regulations but because of COMPETITION
Iphone had no competition for 3 years due to Huawei and it’s throttling leaving it as King of the High Level Market
Today Huawei is back with a vengeance and fuelled by 3 years of sullen anger of the Chinese against the West and a wave of patriotism, it has made a HUGE SPLASH
That’s all this is
Pure Market Competition
The Sopranos – Silvio Calls Out Tony
Members of the Soprano family are unhappy with Tony because he hasn’t handed his cousin over to the Lupertazzi family, potentially putting everyone at risk. Tony is running out of options and in this scene Silvio calls out Tony on his ego.
Create a barrier between you and the enemy. It could be a palisade, a ditch, even stones stacked up across the length of the field will do.
Get a bunch of archers to cover this barrier from a distance.
Voila! You got yourself an obstacle. You can slow the enemy advance or free up a good number of your men to elsewhere, or perhaps, create a ruse that this particular patch is important to you (with all that hauling & digging, something’s gotta give) when it’s not. You’re only held by your own imagination.
A tactic as old as time & the bedrock of taking up defences to this day.
FLASH: U.S. Moving Combat Jets to Romania – “in addition to others committed to NATO”
Maybe you should come to work with me, I work for a rural ambulance service that responds primarily to one of the busiest and most dangerous stretches of interstate hghway in the US…just a couple weeks ago, we were paged to an accident on the interstate…single vehicle rollover, the victims were a 4 year old boy and his father. The boy was properly restrained in a properly installed car seat…His father wasn’t wearing his seatbelt and was ejected from the vehicle as it rolled several times before he was thrown over 25 yards. He landed on his head in the middle of the road…it was actually extremely interesting that he wasn’t killed instantly, considering how much of his actual brain matter was spattered across the asphalt. His heart stopped and he died in the helicopter halfway to the nearest hospital. This wasn’t my first call like this, after nearly 10 years in EMS (and Fire), the smell of human brains doesn’t bother me anymore. Fresh human brain smells like corn chips and mushrooms to me.
My patient was the little boy, and though he’s still in the hospital with a broken back, several broken ribs, compound fractures of both arms, and a skull fracture. He’s recovering well, and should be able to live a pretty normal life. But he’ll be leading it as an orphan because his deceased father wasn’t wearing his seat belt. Not only is the little boy traumatized by the experience, the call also bothered every first responder…we kept him going until the helicopter team arrived by breathing for him via an endotracheal tube (he was intubated) with a bag valve mask and supplemental oxygen while the LUCAS II machine performed chest compressions. Not to mention quite a lot of drugs that were delivered to his body/blood stream by Intraosseous infusion [IO]…instead of giving meds and fluids through a vein like an IV, a small hole is drilled in the upper arm/humerus or the leg, just below the knee. The medications and fluids are pushed into the bone marrow because his blood pressure was too low and he was too critical to take the time to get an IV going to attempt to save him. It was working well, he actually regained just enough mental function to start fighting the tube. However, every time we’d pause the LUCAS to check his heart rhythm, he’d basically die again. He was lucid enough to understand what was happening and I’ll never forget the way his free arm scrabbled at the machine to get away from the chest compressions. Pediatric patients, whether it’s a severe illness or injury, are some of the roughest for many of us (especially those who have children).
Because this man didn’t wear his seat belt, his young son was severely injured and orphaned…and I can’t forget the noises he made, or how hard it was to scrub his blood and brains out of my uniform. Or the screams of absolute terror and pain of my young patient when I had to splint his arms and get an IV going for fluids and pain control. In EMS, if a child can scream and cry, it’s actually a good thing because it means they’re conscious and able to breathe/move enough air so they can scream. Quiet pediatric patients are the scary ones.
I survived a pretty severe rollover myself when I was in college, my seat belt literally saved my life. Any unrestrained passenger basically becomes a projectile in the event of a serious crash, injuring or even killing others in the vehicle if/before being ejected from the vehicle.
So yeah, you can elect not to wear your seat belt, but it’s a pretty good indication of what your mindset is regarding them. If you could prevent the death of yourself, passengers, and other people involved in the accident by simply wearing your goddamn seatbelt why wouldn’t you? “Stupidity” doesn’t just impact the person making the “stupid” decision. It’s one of the easiest and quickest things you can do to protect yourself and the people around you, why wouldn’t you give enough of a shit to take such a basic step?
This photo is from the accident (we take photos at all motor vehicle accidents for our reports), I have several others that are HIPPA-compliant but much worse that I won’t post here. It was enough that me and my crew were there in person and sharing them feels exploitative.
Just wear the goddamn seat belt, okay?
Area 51 Airline? | JANET: The Secret Government Airline That Doesn’t Exist
JANET AIRLINES. Heard of Janet Airlines? No?
Good. That’s exactly what the US government wants. One of the government’s biggest secrets is hiding in plain sight.
In Las Vegas. Janet is the top-secret government airline that doesn’t exist.
Next time you’re in Vegas, visit one of the big casinos next to McCarran Airport.
I’m talking about Luxor, Excalibur, Mandalay Bay.
When you get there, look East at the airport.
All day long, but especially early in the morning and late in the evening; you’ll see mysterious planes taking off and landing.
You can’t miss them. They’re big.
They’re Boeing 737s. They have no markings. No logos.
They’re plain white with a single red stripe. This is Janet Airlines. Janet is a top-secret, air-force owned commuter airline. For civilians. But the destination Janet goes to the most – I’m talking a few times a day- is… Area 51.
Meanwhile in Denmark
Denmark: A17-year-old gi! managed to escape being raped by fighting off her attacker as he ripped olf her dothing. The teenager was attacked around 10p.m. by a man described as “dark skinned” in central Senderborg, Denmark.
The attacker struck her, threw her to the ground and began forcibly removing her. Using a canister of pepper spray, the 17-year-old was able to fight him off ‘and escape the attack.
The police: “It’s illegal to possess and use pepper spray, so she will likely be charged for that,”
Irony being what it is, the girl only began carrying pepper spray because the local police have failed to curtail a wave of sexual attacks by asylum seekers and refugees. Now police say she will be charged with a crime for defending herself.
It is the end of human intelligence.
Brakekleen, WD40 BANNED in Canada
They should limit how many times per year that politicians can fly and see how fast they throw it out.
Well, in the smartphone arena, there is really only one foreign brand left in China.
Yes, Apple.
LG is gone.
HTC is gone.
Samsung is irrelevant.
Nokia, Motorola, Blackberry, Pixel, Sony and a host of has-beens or bit-players are all irrelevant.
It’s Chinese brands, and Apple, with 3 ecosystems, Hongmeng, iOS and Android.
No prizes for guessing how the balance will evolve, given the clear and present risk of disruptive sanctions forcing Google to pull Android licensing from other Chinese vendors.
In Africa, Transsion outsells Samsung, and Chinese brands as a whole dominate market share. Transsion, based in Shenzhen, has a sizable global share of >10%. It is the hidden champion no one has heard of.
The Chinese EV makers recently made waves in the Munich car show, with several media outlets trumpeting them as the “star of the show”. The Chinese overtook Japan as the No. 1 car exporting nation this year, and next year promises more growth.
Fancy Toyota defending its position in a sunset industry? I thought it impossible but the speed of the Chinese transition and the scale plus depth of the EV supply chain they have built is putting lots of doubt in my mind. Not to mention the dearth in AI/ML/big data/UI advances among Japanese automakers.
It isn’t all doom and gloom.
Let’s take a cursory look at Hyundai’s EV strategy. The Ioniq series is a clear step up from the typical Hyundai ICE offering, with premium materials, interiors, paintwork and fit and finish typically not found in the price segment. It is positioned as a bang for the buck premium series, almost luxury, but affordable.
Why?
Because the Chinese are making the mass market EV impossible to compete on cost alone. Besides, volume production necessary for economies of scale are impossible without Chinese partners. Hyundai wisely decided to cede market space and move up the segment instead. Fewer but better, or like my friend puts it, becoming “German”. Hyundai is quietly positioning itself as the Korean BMW or Audi EV.
The Japanese have been slower in response. I am increasingly pessimistic about their chances. What happened to Honda and Mazda’s mainland operations in the past few years portend seismic shifts ahead. EVs are not like ICE cars, because there are critical materials and technologies upstream that China controls.
This time, the patent walls and enabling tools/tech favor China, too.
What happens when the Koreans, Taiwanese, and Japanese can’t make a killing through export-driven demand for their mass market goods?
They will have to move upmarket, selling less for hopefully, more, much like Sony’s repositioning and reorganization. Those that cannot adjust to the speed of the Chinese transition will be crushed.
There we have it.
The days of Samsung and Toyota hitting home runs from economy to premium is coming to an end. They will have to specialize and move upmarket, or bleed red competing with the Chinese.
We’re in for interesting times.
Very interesting times.
This is the real trade war, with abiding consequences.
Family Guy – Best Of Making Fun Of Disney
Family guy loves making fun of Disney and it never EVER! gets old.
One of the main reasons for the retirement of the SR-71 was its high cost and complexity. The SR-71 was very expensive to operate and maintain, requiring a large amount of support personnel, equipment, and fuel. It could not take off with a full load of fuel, so it had to be refueled in the air several times during a mission. It had to use a special type of fuel and a toxic chemical to ignite its engines. Also, the SR-71 leaked fuel on the ground, as its tanks only sealed up when the aircraft reached high speeds and temperatures.
Another reason for the retirement of the SR-71 was the advancement of other technologies that made it less relevant and useful. The SR-71 was designed to fly fast and high to avoid enemy detection and interception. However, with the improvement of radar, missile, and satellite systems, it became more vulnerable and less effective. It also had limited capabilities in terms of data collection and transmission, as it relied on film cameras and radio signals.
On the other hand, the U-2 has remained in service because it has some advantages over the SR-71. The U-2 is cheaper and simpler to operate and maintain, requiring less support personnel, equipment, and fuel. It can take off and land with a full load of fuel, reducing the need for aerial refueling. Also, U-2 uses conventional fuel and engines, making it easier to handle and store.
The U-2 adapted to new technologies that made it more relevant and useful. It has been upgraded and modified over the years to incorporate new sensors, cameras, radars, antennas, and computers. The U-2 can collect and transmit various types of data in real-time, such as imagery, signals, electronic, and geospatial intelligence. Also, it can perform multiple types of missions at once, such as surveillance, reconnaissance, communication relay, research, and testing.
So depending on these factors and others, the U-2 has remained in service while the SR-71 has been retired. The U-2 has proven to be more cost-effective, reliable, versatile, and adaptable than the SR-71. However, this does not mean that the SR-71 was not a remarkable aircraft in its own right. The SR-71 was a groundbreaking achievement in aviation history that pushed the limits of speed, altitude, and stealth.
Oliver Anthony- Rich Men North of Richmond (Remix Mashup ft Kyle B/ Conquering Giants & NZTrillion)
Life is unpredictable and the consequences of the unpredictability are more dire.
You can lose everything you worked for in a flash, and left to your own devices without help from the government.
Just recently a 3 year old child, who fell down a escalator and died as he wiggled out of his mother’s arms, she was charged in his death…yep all over an tragic accident, because in America there are no accidents everything is your fault and you will be punished accordingly.
My cousins home was shot up she was hit 3 times, as was the neighbors son. All because she lived next door to a drug dealer she was struck in her chest, side and back. The 14 year old his arm, all over nothing. Those medical bills and her about to lose her home, we’ll that’s all on her.
600k Medical bankruptcies a year, how scary is that?
Losing a quite few young people I know not just to the opioid epidemic, but treatable things like pneumonia.
My aunt a stage 3 cancer patient was almost a car jacking victim, they didn’t care about her frail condition or turban on her head she eventually sped away when they held a gun to her head.
My moms car was stolen at Christmas eve in front of my grandparents house, that was a great Christmas because my Grandparents were holding some of the gifts and my parents were bringing them home to put under the tree.
My car stolen with the help of a Baltimore city cop.
In the Maryland and DC area there is a couple girls missing a day due to a sex trafficking ring.
My son had been barricaded in an apartment building because of a hostage situation.
My neighbors best friend went missing, all they found was her leg from the thigh down, they still consider her a “missing person” because they claim she can still be alive…so they have never bothered to check the area for other body parts.
My cousins best friend was killed and dismembered by her boyfriend.
My neighbor a couple blocks over bludgeoned his father to death.
The boy a few houses down shot himself in the head at 13.
My neighbor with the missing friend had a mentally ill mother who killed herself Easter morning by running her car into a wall on the beltway.
A lady next door for my friend was killed by police who was in a high speed pursuit with no lights and sirens, all over a guy going 20 miles over the speed limit.
I found the body of one of our favorite customers, with my work mates. He was living in his car, about to lose his legs and afraid of jail time for back child support so he wrote a bunch of letters and shot himself in the head.
Car accidents, I’ve known several people to die tragically in a car accident including my daughters friend, and my sons best friends father. A man my sister used to baby sit for, my childhood school mate, my neighbors behind my mom lost her husband this way. I’m probably missing a few.
I had a man pull a gun on me while walking to work and forced me to get in his car, I ran down the street he followed me. I was in a very public area so I took my chances.
My cousin was grabbed by a man coming out of school she fought her way out and ran, eventually they caught him and let him go he ended up murdering his wife and her sister a couple years later.
I know a elderly woman raped by a care worker. 50 years her junior.
Many Americans won’t have these experiences, because you have to buy your way out of areas where people wallow in tragedy, and misfortunes. If I were rich I could buy my way into a first class lifestyle where my kids would be oblivious to the underworld…but for many of us this is what we see all the time.
The Philadelphia Experiment – The truth about invisibility, teleportation and time travel
This is fun. Do not get too caught up in the narrative. You all know my story. Do not get sidetracked.
The Decline of the place is terrible and both my sons who once wanted Citizenship have left the country permanently
The reasons are different
For my younger son, the startup he worked on was sold and he cashed his stock options from the acquisition firm because he didn’t want to sign the Non Compete Clause. He wanted to work more on his research and China gave him the budget
For my elder son, it was a deterioration of the place, it’s gender horror, the focus on gays and transgender teachers and sex education including homosexuality
The Schooling suddenly says no GPA in the early years because that’s unhealthy
Arizona was better but the problem was the locals start getting angry that you have a mortgage and a car and all those things while they could be laid off
Plus everyone has a DAMN GUN
Kids have guns
So it was either Gays or Guns
So the minute a choice came, he decided to leave US but sadly to the equally decadent Europe instead of the more vibrant Dubai where Investment Bankers can thrive
I still have relatives there but they are all living paycheck by paycheck and unable to save despite averaging $ 80–85 thousand a year
Plus the Healthcare has become horrible now
Especially post Covid
To think I planned a green card or citizenship to this place a few years ago…!!!!!
Fat Dom Gets Whacked By Silvio And Carlo – The Sopranos HD
Do you know the semiconductor sanctions that Huawei has suffered in the past three years? It’s a pity that we can’t buy this mobile phone here in the USA. It is the first mobile phone in the world that directly supports satellite phones. This will definitely be an industrial product that will be recorded in history.
This means that in the past three years, all companies around the world have not been allowed to sell 5G-related semiconductors to Huawei as long as these semiconductors contain American technology.
All companies around the world are not allowed to help Huawei produce semiconductors, as long as your production process contains American technology.
You know, semiconductor is a global division of labor industry. The technology in this industry has always been global cooperation, and there is no semiconductor production and design company in any country that does not contain American technology.
Such sanctions can directly shock companies like Apple and Samsung. They originally thought Huawei would also collapse.
But Mate60 was released. After 3 years, they released a new 5G mobile phone again. This is not just as simple as a mobile phone.
This is a huge technical chain that requires the participation of hundreds of companies with different specialties.
In the past, this required the mutual cooperation of multiple countries, and no country could do it alone.
But now the Chinese have done it. Maybe not top notch, but they really did it.
This means that Chinese companies can make advanced semiconductors (maybe not state-of-the-art) without relying on American technology.
This is a historic event in the global semiconductor industry. It means that China’s semiconductor industry chain has made a comprehensive breakthrough.
Note that I used the word industry chain.
To manufacture a slice of advanced semiconductors requires the participation of many companies and industries. From EDA software, to the cultivation of silicon wafers, chip and framework design, high-purity chemicals, laser devices, lithography machines, etching machines, packaging equipment, and testing technologies.
Chinese people often use the term “shooting oneself in the foot”. Now I can fully understand the meaning of this sentence. Under the pressure of the Americans, the Chinese took three years to complete the independence of the entire semiconductor industry chain. They have gone from 0 to 1, or even from 0 to 10, and the remaining 90 points are just a matter of time.
It can be predicted that ten years later, China’s semiconductor industry will crush its peers around the world through its own scale and cost advantages. No one can sanction them because they do it all themselves, from sand to chips.
U.S. TRANSFERS IT’S MILITARY IN FEAR OF NIGER AFRICANS
This is from Africa. Pay attention to what is NOT being reported in the West.
“As an American, I am grateful to hear the truth on the ground. Great program.”
As I mention in the company I run you would always get customers who would cheekily try and get a discount. You would also get customers who would try and wear you down.
Some of them wouldn’t take no for an answer…
Some of them thought by insulting you screaming obscenities at you they would get you to yield.
I heard it a few times and hopped off my chair went downstairs and simply told them to fuck off and that I didn’t want their business.
They’d often well I’ll go somewhere else and never come back smug response to me.
Unfortunately for them I carried a number of ultra rare parts that hadn’t been made anymore.
Banana Pudding
Ingredients
1 box vanilla wafers
3 bananas
1 cup sugar
3 tablespoons cornstarch
2 cups milk
2 eggs, separated
1 tablespoon butter or margarine
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Instructions
In a casserole dish pour about 3/4 of the vanilla wafers. Slice the bananas over that. Set aside.
Mix the cornstarch into the sugar and place in a large saucepan. Add milk and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly.
Beat the egg yolks with a fork and add about 4 tablespoons hot milk/sugar mixture into the yolks, stirring until well blended (this prevents chunks of cooked egg yolk). Pour the yolk mixture into the saucepan and continue cooking over medium heat, stirring constantly until mixture begins to thicken.
Add vanilla extract and butter or margarine.
Pour the pudding mixture over the bananas and wafers.
To make meringue, beat the two egg whites until stiff. Add 3 tablespoons sugar and 1 teaspoon vanilla extract. Spread over the pudding.
Already happened. Huawei and China have created a completely separate ecosystem of parts, software, and system of systems integration that is completely dark to American corporations and government. It doesn’t use GPS, American sat comms, google services, micron memory, Taiwanese foundries, Korean OLEDs, Japanese cameras and any number of technologies vulnerable to American sanction. Even Swift transactions have been taken care of.
Yes, the chipmaking node remains a formidable moat, but the rest of the ecosystem which is out of reach for even supranational organizations such as ASEAN, UNASUR, and perhaps even the EU are all in place, firmly in the grasp of a third world China, GDP per capita ~12,000 dollars, with a more poorly educated adult population than India.
I count that as a solid Chinese win, on relative terms.
In absolute terms, China is already shaking up the semiconductor sector. America’s belligerence has given the opportunity for China to openly subsidize the industry massively. It is the single largest consumer of chips, befitting its status as the largest global manufacturer. The seismic shift is in the clarion call for self-sufficiency, and if this keeps up, there will be a glut of chips ex-china, while foreign players in the domestic market will have their margins squeezed by local competition. The Chinese will use every trick in the book to grab market share, until sanction becomes a meaningless tool.
The victims of this bloodbath isn’t just American tech, but also the Taiwanese, Korean and Japanese who are all intimately entwined in the East Asian electronics industrial chain. Taiex, in particular, has >50% of its market capitalization in chipmaking (TSMC alone is >30%), and with the Chinese clearly signaling the end of the sunshine era of ECFA, Taiwan will have to readjust massively. I won’t be surprised if all 3 fall into trade deficit with China in the coming decade, with china exporting cost of living inflation.
A comprehensive Chinese win will be denied by pro-western media until China makes the final breakthrough of having clear node leadership and mature designs (especially in the GPU) that are superior to the best America offers. Unlike tobacco, America can’t pull a Philip Morris here because tech products can be tested and torn down, ad infinitum. Huawei and China still lacks mature options in the toolmaking segment, the enablers, so to speak, of chipmaking. The hole will take some years to fill so I’ll still go for a 10 year timeline, backdated to 2019, when Donald the Orange lobbed the first cluster bombs at Huawei.
Huawei and China have been ahead of schedule so far. I’ve heard interesting rumors so far about 2024, while the Mate 60 pro is probably the super phone from Huawei with a 5G modem that the grapevine was whispering about as early as late 2021.
I don’t think China will disappoint.
要打交道就坦荡荡地打交道。
要打压奉陪到底。
JOBLESS YOUTH BROKE DOWN! 😭 | Oliver Anthony “Rich Men North Of Richmond” | Reaction
The world is set to ignite. The old is going to die. It can evaporate quietly, or be ripped into bloody grizzle. But the USA is set to explode.
…
In 1977, one of the top songs was “Love is in the air”, while all of us were jamming to Peter Frampton “Do you feel like I do?” We were watching “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman”, and going to McDonalds to get our 25 cent hamburgers. Our biggest concern at that time was Roller Disco, and whether to have coleslaw or potato salad at the next get together.
Man, life has certainly changed…
…I don’t think that it is an improvement.
Are Chinese citizens legally allowed to use a VPN in China?
Yes. The companies which sell VPN access are state-owned. That’s right, the companies which sell access to get around the Great Firewall are owned by the Party. Welcome to China!
Baking with Hillary
In this program, Hillary Clinton demonstrates how nation building is a lot like baking a cake. Yum!
The Barbary Corsairs were afraid of Britain, because the UK was a naval superpower, and so they didn’t dare attack them. British ships sailed unhindered through North African waters.
This immunity to attack had also applied to ships of the 13 Colonies prior to independence, but not to the new United States. The Barbary Corsairs were not afraid of them, so American ships soon came under attack.
This went on for over a decade. Eventually in 1801 President Jefferson decided to go to war with one of the Barbary States, Tripoli. He sent a small fleet, which linked up with the Swedish navy who were also at war with Tripoli. The US also had significant help from the Kingdom of Naples, which offered them the use of three naval ports in Sicily as well as supplies and port personnel. Without this aid it is doubtful that the US Navy could have conducted a successful war so far from home.
However, saying that the US ‘destroyed and defeated the Barbary Pirates’ is a major exaggeration. They blockaded one Barbary city, Tripoli, engaging in several naval actions and raids onto the land until finally, after four years, the Pasha of Tripoli agreed to negotiate a treaty. This required the Americans to pay Tripoli the sum of $60,000 ($1.5 million in today’s value) and in return the Barbary State released about 300 American slaves.
This did not end Barbary attacks on American ships. In 1815, just after the end of the US war with Britain, another fleet was sent to the Mediterranean, this time to attack Algiers. They were able to force the Dey of Algiers to release about 10 captives and pay compensation of $10,000. He also promised to stop attacking American ships in the future, but soon afterwards (when the US warships had returned home) repudiated this treaty.
It was at this point that Britain decided to get involved.
The Napoleonic Wars were over, and the UK had naval power to spare for more humanitarian missions such as ending piracy. A large fleet of British warships including five ships of the line, in cooperation with a squadron of Dutch frigates, was despatched to the Mediterranean. The Barbary States were ordered to halt all piracy and free their Christian slaves.
The states of Tunis and Tripoli, intimidated, backed down without a fight. Algiers resisted.
Admiral Pellew, commanding the British fleet and its Dutch attached squadron, ordered an attack on Algiers on 27 August 1816. The city was heavily fortified with over 300 cannons in land forts as well as many warships in the harbour. The fighting was bloody and went on late into the night, with almost a thousand casualties in the Anglo-Dutch fleet; but the Algerian forts were pounded into rubble, their guns destroyed and their ships sunk.
The following day, the ruler of Algiers surrendered to the British admiral. He freed over 3,000 Christian slaves and paid compensation of $372,000 (£80,000). He also agreed to end the practice of piracy entirely.
In practice, the Barbary Corsairs did not entirely keep their promise to end piracy, though its scale was much reduced after 1816. It took the French colonisation of North Africa, beginning in 1830, to end Barbary piracy forever.
The view on America after spending 40 years in Asia
This is pretty good. Well worth the time to watch. Very interesting.
Meet Karl. He is from the US and has been working in Asia for almost forty years. Karl speaks Mandarin Chinese fluently and was known as a rainmaker for NFT technology in China. He told me about cultural differences with his Taiwanese-Chinese wife, his views on how America should treat its immigrants, and the way his views on the US changed after living in Asia. Enjoy!
My father is a Vietnam veteran with three purple hearts and a silver star. He is the toughest person I have ever known.
This is his story
My father volunteered to join the Army in 1968, he did not get drafted. He worked in a saw mill as a teenager, and grew up the son of poor Italian immigrants. He was raised in a quanset hut in Connecticut (yes there are poor people in Connecticut) until my Grandfather had enough money to build a house by hand with a couple of buddies in the late 50s or early 60s.
Once in Vietnam my father was wounded three times, but on the first two he never left the country even though he could have.
The third time defines toughness.
My father’s platoon, as part of a company operation, walked directly into a VC Base camp in southern Vietnam (my father was a grunt in the 2/60th of the 9th Infantry Division) roughly during the Tet offensive.
A VC Machine gunner fired on him from a concealed position that was no more than 15 feet away. One round instantly almost ripped his foot completely off, and it dangled mainly by the achilles tendon. Another round destroyed my dad’s hand, and also another rendered his M16 inoperable because the bullet went through the bolt and destroyed the action. When he fell down from the impact, and somehow crawled a bit, he somehow escaped the wrath of that particular machine gun nest, but then he saw another in front of him, but this new VC machine gunner didn’t see him yet and was firing at others in his unit.
At this point, men were screaming in pain for help everywhere around my father, and the pain in his hand and leg grew, and he was weaponless. He had to get away from this new machine gun without it seeing him, and the only way to go was over the rice paddy dike that was about 10 feet behind him.
As soon as he moved one inch to begin his escape, that machine gun swung around on him and opened fire. My father only talks about this moment with me, and he only talked about it once or twice ever, and he literally breaks down with the shakes at the recollection.
As the bullets spewed at him, he jumped up, standing on the end of his ankle bone on his right leg, since the foot was flopping, and did the best he could to basically run and dive over the dike. In the process he was hit three more times. Once in the underside of his arm, shredding his bicep and part of his tricep, again in the shoulder, and another in the underside of his Jaw/face.
He landed in the mud on the other side of the dike and could feel his jaw swinging on his face, and his arm was pumping blood like a garden hose. He didn’t even feel the one in the shoulder at all.
His tongue and face began to swell so badly that he couldn’t breath, so he somehow cut himself a trachea with a jackknife using his one good hand. He also packed his arm with mud to stop the bleeding because those Army bandages were totally useless.
the trachea didn’t work perfectly, so he occasionally had to grab his swollen tongue and pull it down so he could breath a bit more, and he did this intermitently as he put his bayonet between his thighs, and hooked the pin on his grenades on the blade so he could pull the pin with his one hand and throw the grenades. He said he couldn’t talk, but he was trying to yell at “the sons of bitches” the whole time.
He crawled along the dike and got weapons from the dead, or from those who were so wounded they couldn’t function, and continuously fired them with one hand to hold the enemy back (they had started to advance through their kill zone basically). Multiple evac helicopters were shot down during this time, and eventually my father had lost so much blood he started to fade… he was going to die.
Out of nowhere, a huge black man from Texas named Cleaver, scooped up my father, and carried him to a chopper that had finally been able to land somewhere. This man barely knew my dad, given that he was black and this was 1968 so the platoon was kind of self-segregated. Cleaver saved his life, and I wouldn’t be here without him – today he would have gotten the medal of honor, but then he didn’t get a damn thing. This is a whole ‘nother story.
Cleaver ran through a hail of bullets, and threw my dad in a huey on top of other bodies, and that’s the last thing my father remembers until he woke up in a hospital in, IIRC, Okinawa (could be wrong on that).
Fast forward two years and hundreds of operations on his jaw, arm, hand, and ankle, my dad is released from the Army with a 300$ pension (they messed up his disability rate, but he “never expected to get any money anyway because he had volunteered”). He is missing a finger and has limited use of his right hand, and his ankle is fused together with a tangle of screws, and his jaw was bone graffed back together but was wired shut for almost a year.
He got a job in a factory in Deep River, CT, marries my mom, and has kids (me). In the late 70s and early 80s he still gets multiple operations, and I remember him shooting an M1 carbine out the window due to insane flashbacks (we lived in the middle of nowhere). He worked in this factory for 30 years.
Then something else happens to him. He somehow becomes deathly allergic to bee stings. He has three near death experiences with this, barely surviving one occasion. He always says, “I can take 5 machine gun rounds, but a goddamn bee sting is what’s gonna kill me… WTF”
He coached our school soccer and baseball teams for years from crutches, or a wheelchair, or both, and every year he coached we won the CT shoreline championships (soccer).
Then another thing happened. One day my grandfather and him were cutting wood in the forest, and a dead tree fell on him. Imagine the luck. You’re in the woods, and a dead tree decides to fall, right on where you are squatted cutting another tree. My grandfather yelled to him just in time for him to turn, and that turn allowed the tree to only graze him. He still was unconscious for several days in the hospital, had a massive concussion and other damage, but somehow lived.
He was also electrocuted once as well… but this post is getting too long already so I’ll stop there.
My dad is now 73, and his wounds don’t get any better, especially the mental ones. He met Cleaver later in life, and they were both so overwhelmed that they really didn’t know what to say, and then they never talked again, because it was just too emotional. He was awarded a Silver Star for his actions that day, but he really doesn’t give a shit about that medal.
I also forgot to mention that he is an amazing father, and one of the kindest people you would ever know. Half of what I’ve done, and do, in my life was/is just a pathetic attempt to impress him.
Now if that ain’t tough, I don’t know WTF is. Also, think about Cleaver, also tough AF.
SO MUCH TRUTH!! | Rapper Reacts to Oliver Anthony – Rich Men North Of Richmond (First Reaction)
Number one: Teenagers wearing khakis and blazers with an embroidered logo. When I lived in Boston, I hung out a lot in Harvard Square, and there were a fair number of kids like this walking around. I don’t know if they dressed this way because they were part of a fraternity, or they were high-school students at a nearby boarding school (Phillips Exeter, Phillips Andover, etc.). But it’s something you don’t see in very many places.
Number two: Dogs in sweaters and matching booties, being led by women in sunglasses. Saw this around Little Italy/Houston St. in New York. It was just so out of the ordinary! I get it that broken glass and such is common in New York, and that some protection can sometimes be a good thing, but there are plenty of _people_ who don’t color-coordinate their shoes to their outfit every day: to do that for both yourself and your dog says something.
Number three: teenagers with Porsches/Maseratis/etc. Ran into a few of these in Boston: there are students there coming from immensely wealthy families, sometimes insensibly so. No way you’re a 19-year-old college student paying for a brand-new sports car/ritzy SUV.\
Number four: Mentioning “my club” in passing conversation, such as “I met her today at my club for lunch.” Or “there’s a ‘function’ (not a _party_, mind 😉 ) at my club tonight.” A lot of people might belong to a book club, or perhaps a bowling team, or even a chess club, but usually they preface it with the activity in question. If you can afford tens of thousands of dollars to belong to a private golf club, country club, racquet club, etc., you’re upper class.
Russian spacecraft crashes into the Moon – BBC News
Something is going on here. I strongly suspect that there is more to this story than what meets the eye.
Braised Pork with Green Chile Sauce
Mild green chiles season this meaty pork stew. Serve it with rice or as a burrito filling. This can also be served with tamales. This chile verde is also good served with scrambled eggs.
Ingredients
Pork
1 (3 pound) lean boneless pork butt
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 large onion, chopped
4 garlic cloves, minced
2 large green bell peppers, seeded and chopped
1 (7 ounce) can diced green chiles
1 teaspoon dried oregano leaves, crumbled
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher or sea salt
1/2 cup fresh cilantro, chopped
1 tablespoon wine vinegar
1/4 cup water
Garnish
Tomatoes, cut into wedges
Cooked rice
Sour cream
Lime, cut into wedges
Instructions
Trim and discard fat and cut pork into 1 inch cubes.
In a large frying pan, heat oil over medium-high heat; add meat a few cubes at a time and cook until very brown.
Push meat to side of pan and add onion, garlic and bell peppers; sauté until limp.
Stir in chiles, oregano, cumin, salt, cilantro, vinegar and water.
Cover and simmer until meat is fork tender (about 1 hour).
Skim off fat and discard.
Serve with rice or make burritos or serve in your favorite way.
For Burritos: spoon pork into warm, soft flour tortillas, add sour cream, tomato wedges, and a squeeze of lime juice and fold to enclose. Rice may also be enclosed with the filling in the burritos, if desired.
Originally Answered: What are the most epic fails in history?
“The Americans should know the character of the men they are dealing with in Singapore and not get themselves further dragged into calumny…..They are not dealing with Ngo Dinh Diem or Syngman Rhee. You do not buy and sell this Government.”
In 1960, a CIA agent was caught attempting to purchase confidential information from Singapore intelligence officers. They offered a $3.3 million bribe (equivalent to $25 million in today’s money) to then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew to keep hush about the matter.
Instead, PM Lee insisted on $33 million in economic aid as Singapore was then a 3rd world country.
A few years later, the US vehemently denied the entire incident. This caused Lee Kuan Yew to go ballistic and threaten to release full reports and recordings to the public. It was only then did the US government admit and make a formal apology.
A long, long time ago… when I was a boy of 14 years old… I started my first job. I was a “tipple loader” at a coal mine in Western Pennsylvania. My job was to operate the rock crusher and then use the conveyor belt to load hopper-cars (a type of train car) with crushed coal.
Throughout the 1960s, the 70s, and well into the 1990s it was common for the older workers to harass and “break in” the new kid. And during my teen years, I sure as heck got the brunt of it all.
One of the things they would do is order me to “fetch a boom-hoist-clamp” which is just a simple clamp on a drag-line. Now, drag-lines are big enormous machines.
And so, being young and inexperienced, they would gleefully chuckle and laugh at how stupid I was as I would climb the boom to the top to get this fucking clamp.
Being so young, and ignorant, I really didn’t realize that I was risking my life…
…on a joke, for minimum wage. It never occurred to me. As this was my first experience to the harsh world of much older men who have lived the “hard life” in the hills of Western Pennsylvania. And so I endured the various initiations. And worked hard…
…until I was able to pull myself out of that environment and go to university to study aerospace engineering and leave that Hell-hole.
But…
Let’s get back to the question.
Why are the Oligarchs so easy to start a war with China?
Well, like myself as a young boy and my first experience with the harsh world of rough and scrabble men, I had no idea of what I was going up against. Neither do these oligarchs. They think in terms of what they know, and what they don’t know is something that NEVER crosses their mind.
They believe the funded lies about “Russia collapsing”, “Putin will be disposed any day now”, “Ukraine is winning”, ‘Russian military is a joke”…. and they most certainly believe the massive lies (oh, so much greater and so much more outrageous) concerning China…
China will collapse any day now.
The Chinese dictatorship cannot face the American military might.
China has no weapons able to compete or fight the mighty nations of Rambo soldiers.
China is weak, and helpless.
And so on and so forth.
And so, when I listen to these oligarchs speak, and their proxy figureheads talk to the “news” media, it’s like some kind of warped parody. The ignorance is staggering. And like myself, (as a young boy of 14) I had no idea that I was risking my life for something as trivial as the chuckles and cajoling of the elder men.
These idiots will draw the United States into a war with China, and the United States will lose. Sure as shit. It doesn’t matter if it is conventional, economic, or nuclear. The United States is on the fast-track to “suicide by cop”.
And that is what happens with you are ignorant, stupid, and egotistical and facing a lethal opponent that isn’t.
FIRST TIME LISTEN | Oliver Anthony – Rich Men North Of Richmond | REACTION!!!!
In the 90s, a group of kids were playing football at the local football pitch that was situated near a rocky mountain. One of the kids kick the ball into a pile of rocks at the side of the mountain, and when one of the kids went to retrieve the ball he was left horrified when he discovered the body of a man crushed by a large boulder.
The man had been pinned under the boulder, but what was even more unusual was the fact his pants was down and he was holding a chicken in his hands. When investigators tried to piece together the mans final moments, they came to the conclusion that the man had been trying to tenderise the chicken, so to speak.
They believe the 39-year-old bricklayer named Herminio Rivera Coucerio had abducted a hen in Orsense, in Spain, and brought it to the mountain side to have his way with it. They believed his rigorous trusting had caused the boulder to come lose and rolled on top of him, and killed him instantly.
Against common misconception, quicksand will not drown you as it is denser than your torso. The problem with quicksand is that you can practically get stuck in it and die from hunger, thirst, or extreme temperatures.
The force required to lift your foot out of quicksand at a speed of 1 cm per second is equal to the lift force of a medium-size car. So if you are really stuck in the middle of quicksand, forget about moving your legs out of the sand with just force.
First of all, you need to get rid of excess weight, which will be a huge obstacle to escape. Breathe deeply as your fully filled lungs will allow you to float better.
If you are standing, lean back into a position where you can float. This will allow your feet to return to the surface as your weight is more evenly distributed.
When you move your legs up while in the floating position, let the quicksand under your legs fill for a moment.
Move slowly inch by inch toward the shore.
Try reaching for something outside like a tree branch and try to drag yourself out. Only do this when your feet are on the surface again.
THIS SONG IS AMAZING!!! Oliver Anthony – Rich Men North Richmond Reaction
When most women are young, they’re attracted to men with good looks, charm, charisma, confidence, and raw sexual magnetism.
As time passes, people age, and life experiences accumulate, most women start to realize that other things are important. Like a good credit rating. Now the ball’s in my court.
To be clear, I’m not talking about being rich (never was, probably never will be). I’m talking about being responsible, reliable, predictable. The kind of guy who pays all his bills on time, has his tax returns filled out in February, spend his weekends doing yardwork rather than partying, and has never once gotten in a fight with a bouncer.
Being conventional to the point of being boring seems to hold little appeal to women in their teens and twenties.
But…
I’ve found that most women in their thirties have had a lot of bad experiences with ‘exciting’ guys, and are ready to settle down with someone they can count on.
I just had to hang around for enough years that a woman I knew felt the need to settle, and then closed the deal as quick as possible.
Those of us who lack the looks have to deal in patience.
When I was 18 year’s old, my mom submitted my application to a place looking for part-time help. I had no idea she did this.
I didn’t find out until after she already had the interview set up for me.
The interview was in a part of town I had never been in before.
Everything was extremely run down looking. Homeless people were wandering the streets and sidewalks with their shopping carts. Almost every building on the block, including the one I was interviewing in, had some sort of graffiti on the side.
I walked inside the building to find unfinished concrete walls and floors. The desks and tables were dilapidated and covered in dust.
“Are you here for an interview?”
That was my assumption, but this place looked more like it was ready to shut down than it was to hire someone new.
“Paul, Robert is here for your 10:30 interview.”
Tucked in the corner of the building was a make-shift office set up where Paul sat. Behind him was a bookshelf that looked no better than the other furniture in the building. Sitting on top of his bookshelf was an long ivy plant that stretched halfway to the floor.
That stuck out to me because that plant was the only sort of decoration that I could see in the entire place.
Instead of going to his desk, Paul met me at the front door. After exchanging some short introductions, Paul asked –
“Have you ever worked a heat press before?”
I had no idea what a heat press was.
“That’s okay, we’ll teach you. The pay is $9.00/hr but it’s a temporary position. We’ll only need you for about 3 months. If all sounds good, you can start tomorrow.”
The entire interview took less than 5 minutes.
That was 16 years ago. Even though the position was only supposed to last for 3 months, I’m still here, sitting in the space where Paul used to sit. Only now that space has walls around it to form an actual office.
We’ve also painted the building, finished the walls and floors, and replaced all the furniture.
One of the only physical items left from 2007 is that ivy plant, which now sits on top of a shelf behind my desk… along with some other plants that I’ve collected and am trying not to kill.
El Dorado Casserole
I have been making this casserole for as long as I can remember. It’s very good and exceptionally good warmed up the next day.
Yield: 8 servings
Ingredients
1 pound ground beef
1 medium onion, chopped
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
16 ounces tomato sauce
1 cup sliced black olives
8 ounces sour cream
1 cup cottage cheese
1 (4 ounce) can diced green chiles
7 ounces tortilla corn chips, crushed
8 ounces (or more, if desired) Monterey Jack cheese, shredded
Instructions
Cook beef until browned.
Drain. Add onion, garlic powder, tomato sauce and olives. Cook over low heat until the onion is clear.
Combine sour cream, cottage cheese and chiles.
Layer half the chips, meat mixture, sour cream mixture and Monterey Jack cheese in a greased 2 1/2-quart casserole.
Repeat this layering a second time.
Bake at 350 degrees F for 30 minutes.
Why Rolling Stone is TERRIFIED of Oliver Anthony
Country musician Oliver Anthony went from unknown to the top of the iTunes charts after his song, “Rich Men North of Richmond,” went viral overnight.
But music press outlets like Rolling Stone immediately became hostile.
They started churning out headlines trying to tie Anthony to right-wing politics and Q-Anon, and even suggested he was a plant for far-right culture warriors.
But former Mumford & Sons banjoist Winston Marshall, who knows a thing or two about political attacks against musicians, joins Glenn to explain what’s really going on: the former countercultural generation has “become the establishment.”
But is there still a chance that an authentic artist like Oliver Anthony can unite a divided country?
Xi awarded Order of South Africa
Chinese President Xi Jinping received the Order of South Africa from President Cyril Ramaphosa on Tuesday.
The award ceremony came following Xi’s meeting with Ramaphosa during his state visit to South Africa, where he will also attend the 15th BRICS Summit and co-chair with Ramaphosa the China-Africa Leaders’ Dialogue.
The Order of South Africa is the highest decoration and the highest honor that South Africa awards to an important and friendly head of state.
Speaking at the ceremony, Xi said the China-South Africa comprehensive strategic partnership has entered a “golden era,” as political mutual trust between the two sides continues to deepen, and mutually beneficial and practical cooperation in various fields has yielded fruitful results.
The two countries have maintained close coordination and cooperation in international affairs, which has effectively promoted their respective development and revitalization, and made positive contributions to safeguarding the common interests of developing countries, he noted.
Xi reiterated that no matter how the international situation changes, the two sides will remain committed to deepening bilateral friendly cooperation.
Noting that he will treasure the honor, which symbolizes the friendship between the two peoples, Xi pledged to unswervingly push for the continuous development of China-South Africa relations.
China, because its dominant political party, unlike India’s who worship cows and discriminate against fellow Indians based on caste, has developed China much better.
It is this weird juxtaposition that occurs between this deeply Christian part of our state and a very naughty other half.
It’s not uncommon to see stuff like this:
This isn’t one of those “never masturbate,” “quit porn,” posts. I actually get annoyed with those posts. Go do your thing. Enjoy you some porn, ladies and gents.
But.
There is this porn DVD store that I pass, yes – DVD, on the way to work.
Every time I pass this store, typically between 7:45AM and 7:50AM,
There are at least 3–4 cars in the parking lot, and that bitch is open for business.
If any of you catch me shopping for porn DVDs at 7:45 AM on a Tuesday –
This is from a school dance a year or two ago. It was the Valentine’s Day dance and we were all having a lot of fun. All of a sudden there’s a big commotion in the gym. There’s a huge crowd and everyone around has their phones out and seem to be recording something.
I’m able to see what’s going on my pushing myself through and what I see is literally horrifying.
This girl is breathing crazily and crying with her hands on her head. Two girls are next to her (friends I assume) saying, “GUYS STOP! SHE’S HAVING A PANIC ATTACK!”
Everyone around in that circle is recording.
Recording a 12 year old at a dance having a panic attack.
Soon the teachers help the girl outside to get some fresh air and the teachers tell everyone to delete the video they took. I know they never really deleted it.
But this is absolutely absurd. The fact that everyone didn’t even try to help but recorded her is awful. I didn’t see her since or really ever knew her, but I know I would hate it if someone recorded me at a low moment like this.
While I was in college, I worked as a security guard at a factory that reprocessed scrap cloth into felt.
One of the maintenance workers was notably lacking in common sense. I once found him on the roof of the factory, watching a seized-up motor burn, with six-inch flames coming up to it.
He wasn’t making any attempt to cut the power to the motor, or put the fire out. I commented that I was surprised the circuit breaker hadn’t tripped. He explained that he had bypassed the circuit breaker, “because it was tripping too often”.
As part of my duties, I wrote and submitted a fire report. He was still kept on as a member of the maintenance crew, because he was the plant manager’s son-in-law.
RICH MEN NORTH OF RICHMOND RAP remix By: Black Pegasus – INSPIRED by Oliver Anthony!
I have no interest in being a billionaire, but I would like to be homeless one day.
When the kids are grown and out of the house, I see no point in having one. I’ll pick up one of these, sell the house, and go wherever the wheels take me.
I was working at a company for about a year and a half. It was just another day. I was talking with my co-worker who I shared an office with. I said, “You really don’t want to be called in to speak with H.R. If you do, it’s pretty likely you’re being laid off.”
Right then, as if on cue, my phone rang. It was the head of H.R. She wanted me to come to her office.
My heart sank. I told my co-worker, who I’ll call Greg. He blew it off. “It’s probably nothing. Probably just something with your benefits.”
I didn’t think so, but marched over to her office. My boss’s boss was there. I was invited to take a seat and I did so.
Mrs. H.R. said, “Okay, you’re being terminated, effective immediately.”
“Wait, what?” I said.
“Your employment with us is being terminated. Now.”
I couldn’t believe it. I had just finished a pretty important feature for our project and had just got a “Congrats!” from my boss.
“What…” I said. “What for?”
Boss’s boss answered, “For not doing your work.” His face was flushed and he looked ashamed.
I still couldn’t believe it. Doing my work was all I did, every day. “According to who? Who said that?”
“Your manager.” The one who had just given me the “attaboy!”. Boss’s boss looked even more ashamed.
I had been given no warning that my work was insufficient. In fact, quite the opposite. “Uh, for future reference,” I said, “it might be a good idea to let your employees know when they’re not meeting expectations.”
Mrs. H.R. made me sign some papers. She said signing them was non-voluntary. I was still in a haze and just signed them.
My manager handed me off to a guy who I vaguely recognized from some IT or facilities function. He looked like he could easily be in a body building competition. He escorted me downstairs to someone else, who explained to me I was being fired and made me hand over my badge. She was about to have me escorted out by Mr. Muscles when I asked her if I needed to surrender my CAC as well.
She said, “Oh, yeah, I’ll need that too.” She acted like this was the first time she had done this. She was flustered.
Mr. Muscles took me back up to my office, where he watched me pack what few belongings I had. Greg wasn’t there. I left him a note to call me.
Mr. Muscles escorted me outside, where I walked to my car. I drove home, trying to process what had just happened. I had never been fired before. I’d never even been warned about “insufficient performance”.
Greg got a hold of me later that day. When he saw my note, he noticed a bunch of people were disappearing from the office. He found our manager and asked if his neck was on the chopping block too. He said, “Yes.”
He asked him why. He said he couldn’t tell him.
When it was Greg’s turn for the “You’re Fired” ride, he turned to our boss’s boss and said, “Chase*, what you’re doing is wrong, and you know it.” Wow, guts are one thing Greg didn’t lack.
He said in all, about 40 people were let go that day. All were “fired”.
No one fires 40 people in one day, unless they were all involved in some sort of widespread fraud or something, and of course we weren’t.
Over the course of the next few days, we pieced together something that sort of made sense, but not really. It was a layoff, but they had to call it firing so they wouldn’t have to pay us severance. That kind of made sense, but I’ve been laid off before and never got any severance. Why was this case any different?
It turns out that the company was trying to win a big government/military contract that was up for re-compete. They hired all 40 of us to build a “demo” to bid for the system. They didn’t win it, and thus needed to get rid of us.
The “firing” part really hurt, though.
The company has since been bought out twice. The company has a totally different name now, and different owners.
But they kept their employment records. Over the years, recruiters have tried to place me there again, under the new company. They always reject me, saying they wouldn’t rehire me because they fired me once before.
Yeah, fired. Just call it what it really was, you cowards: a non-severance layoff.
Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North Of Richmond” Is The War Cry The Working Class Has Been Waiting For
This is actually a very good video and connects the Fourth Turning to Oliver Anthony.
All that China has to do is to BE SATISFIED with its present position and be prepared to be Number 2 all it’s life
The West will never target China and it would always be a great country and best friends
The West especially the US emasculates any threat it perceives to it’s dominance with a combination of
Political upheavals or color revolutions or
Propaganda
or
Stoking nationalist sentiments against a specific nation
or
Economic Throttling
That’s how they neutralized the EU or Japan or S Korea to date
Sadly China, India, Russia are three nations that remain defiant
Of the three – China is the most likely candidate to pip the US in the next two decades and thus the West which is more or less an accepted fiefdom of the USA is targeting China most heavily
Color Revolutions won’t work in China, a 90% Han majority country
Political Upheavals wont work as Xi Jingping is firmly in charge and has consolidated the CPC
Nationalist Sentiments work against USA now
All that is left is Economic Throttling and that’s what the US is doing and forcing it’s allies to do the same
Chinas Defiance , Indias Defiance, Russia’s Defiance is getting a bit worrisome for the West
Especially Chinas, since China has the Economic Clout and a huge stack of money and a massive industry, not to mention a consumer market that is 16% of the World’s Consumption, third highest after US and EU
So the West want to ensure that China can’t end the “Western way of life” Or the “Western Dominance” Or question “US Exceptionalism”
Unfortunately the US has lost the art of diplomacy long ago and has become somewhat of a bully
As a result, it is unable to persuade most nations to toe the line
Left to itself, China could have been happy with imports and never really aspired to do more
Instead by these sanctions, China knows it has to buck up and do a lot of hard work and can’t rely or trust the USA
Thus US and the West scored an Own Goal in this aspect
I caused a young guy to get fired on the spot. It actually wasn’t intentional on my part.
Every Friday a friend and I used to meet to play pool. We found that a local bingo hall had a cafe& lounge area and the table was only 50p a game and the food & snacks were really cheap.
One Friday I ordered my meal, it was only £3. When the usual guy rang it up I was looking at the screen on the top of the register and I saw ‘staff discount’ and the total dropped to £2 but he told me £3, obviously he was pocketing the difference.
I messed around getting cutlery and sauces next to the register and watched him do the same thing to the next few customers.
I went back to the table where my friend was and told him what the cheeky git was up to. No big deal, we both commented it was a bit naughty and that was that.
However there was a woman on the next table who clearly heard our conversation. She stood up, put on a blazer with a badge stating ‘supervisor’, promptly walked over to the cashier, printed something out and escorted him away.
Never saw the young guy again.
Oliver Anthony – Rich Men North Of Richmond | Reaction
The deep sea is perhaps the most terrifying environment on the planet. Not a glimmer of sunlight to be found, only pitch darkness. The water icy cold, and almost devoid of oxygen. The immense and crushing pressure is enough to kill a human instantly. No source of food, other than the slow precipitation of organic debris trickling down from above; “marine snow”.
And yet, against all the odds, if you stare long enough into the abyss, something will stare back.
In 1966, the crew of a deep sea submarine learned as much. The vessel, dubbed the Deepstar 4000, began its descent not far off the coast of California, on a mission to deploy some hydrographic technology on the seabed, which lay some 1,200 metres below the surface. With the tremendous pressures at this depth, every inch of glass is a threat to the submarine’s structural integrity, so there was only one tiny window for the crew to look outside.
After the Deepstar 4000 touched down on the ocean floor, its pilot Joe Thompson glanced out the diminutive porthole, and saw something extraordinary.
By Thompson’s account, he found himself gazing into an eye “as big as a dinner plate”, belonging to a fish whose skin was “mottled” and “gray-black”. The fish, he estimated, was at least 25 feet (7.6 metres) long! It kicked up a cloud of silt in its wake, and within a matter of seconds, the encounter was over, and the abyss regained its characteristic eerie stillness.
Shortly thereafter, underwater cameras in the nearby area were triggered by the motion of a massive marine creature. One of them captured this photograph.
This image is not from a made up spooky story, it depicts a very real creature. A creature which might just be the culprit behind the infamous Deepstar 4000 encounter. To me, this animal is the scariest and most intimidating of all the deep sea horrors we have discovered, but also one of the most fascinating. It is a Pacificsleeper shark.
A close cousin of the much better-known Greenland shark, this species is found in waters across the North Pacific, and even the Arctic Ocean. It spends most of its days deep in the marine void, sometimes thousands of metres below the surface. Because of this strange lifestyle, the Pacific sleeper shark is shrouded in mystery, and to this day we know very very little about it.
What we do know is that it is one of the largest sharks on the planet. Though we have never scientifically measured a 25 footer like the one possibly sighted by the Deepstar 4000, we know for certain they can grow to four and a half metres in length, which is already gigantic. In 1989, a sleeper estimated to be seven metres was filmed in Tokyo Bay, while in Hawaii one was photographed that was potentially over nine metres long!
If these estimates are true, the Pacific sleeper shark could be the world’s third largest shark species, after the filter-feeding whale shark and basking shark. The claims are very much within the realms of possibility. Other shark species are well known to display a massive range in size, with some individuals being a whole 50% larger than the average specimen. After all, so long as they have enough food, sharks never stop growing.
And Pacific sleeper sharks sure do have plenty of time to grow. If their almost identical cousins the Greenland sharks are anything to go on, they can live for hundreds of years, perhaps half a millennium. There are likely sleeper sharks alive today that have lived through the entirety of modern history.
How does such gargantuan animals survive so deep in the abyss, where food is so scarce? Their extremely slow metabolism helps, though as a result, they are very sluggish. The aptly named sleeper sharks cruise through the depths at an extraordinarily slow speed of about 1 kilometre per hour – if you saw one in front of you, you’d barely even notice it moving! Being such slowpokes, we long assumed them to be scavengers, as they’d surely be useless predators.
However, when we dissected sleepers that got caught in fishing nets, the contents of their stomachs told a very different story. Inside, scientists found fresh remains of practically every kind of animal that the sharks share their habitats with. Fish, crustaceans, cephalopods, sea lions, porpoises… these beasts are far from carrion feeders, they are apex predators!
One shocking food item in particular seems more common than any other; the beaks of giant squid! This means that the Pacific sleeper shark is one of only two animals on the planet that can hunt and kill giant squid, the other being the sperm whale. The thought of such a slow-moving creature being able to take down this prey may seem impossible, but the shark’s thick and muscular tail fin indicates that it can produce violent bursts of intense speed when it needs to.
With a gaping and oddly circular maw, the sleeper shark can effectively “inhale” most of the prey it encounters. Victims too large to be eaten by suction are chomped to death by its massive bite force and sharp, needle-like teeth, pictured below. It also has a truly enormous stomach, which allows it to store food for long periods of time, a lifesaver in the barren deep sea. The stomach of one specimen was found to contain over 135 kilograms of accumulated food!
Lack of food is but one of the many challenges posed by life at such depths. The extreme pressure and frigid temperatures can wreak damage even at the molecular level, destabilising proteins within organisms’ cells. To protect against this, Pacific sleeper sharks employ a powerful chemical known as trimethylamine oxide (TMAO), which circulates in their bloodstream in incredibly high concentrations.
As it turns out, TMAO also has psychoactive properties – it is in fact a potent nerve agent. Because of that, if you eat sleeper shark meat, you’ll soon start to show symptoms of severe drunkenness, which may last for days. This is known as being “shark drunk”. The flesh of the (again, very closely related) Greenland shark is a delicacy in Iceland, called hákarl, but it is left to ferment for months before being safe to eat. It smells and tastes like urine, due to the vast quantities of urea in sleeper sharks’ blood.
Yet another fascinating thing about Pacific sleeper sharks is that almost all of them are blind. This is not a condition they have at birth, however. At some point in their lives, sleepers will invariably fall victim to a rather horrifying parasite called Ommatokoita elongata. This tiny worm-like creature is actually a crustacean, though it doesn’t look the part.
Ommatokoita attaches itself to the cornea of its unfortunate host, and remains there permanently, slowly eating away at the poor shark’s eyeball. It’s seemingly not fatal, as virtually all sleeper sharks have them and they can live for hundreds of years, but it does make them go blind. To be fair, eyesight isn’t of much use in a pitch black void, anyway.
That is absolutely everything you need to know about the Pacific sleeper shark, because it’s just about everything we do know about the Pacific sleeper shark. What I find even more interesting is everything we don’t know, all the mysteries that science shall hopefully solve in the coming decades, as we learn more about these incredible real-life sea monsters.
In 2012 I was in Germany on business when I was invited to the home of the managing director for dinner. The house was beautiful and located on a hillside with a spectacular view over a sheltered valley. After dinner we were sitting on the varanda drinking coffee when my host explained that not only did he own the valley but it was an additional source of income.
He stated that he was very grateful to the wartime RAF who had bombed the valley. There had been a small stream flowing through the valley until a bomber had jettisoned it’s bombs, probably after being attacked by a night fighter. The resulting bomb craters had filled up with water and were now a very profitable trout farm.
We leaned over the varanda balustrade and he pointed out the seven deep pools strung along the valley bottom. It was the number seven that worried me. Looking down from above you could clearly see the pools were grouped in a string of three with a short gap followed by a string of four pools. I am no bomber expert but I had to point out to my host that I would have expected any bomber to carry a balanced load. That and the gap in the regular positioning of the bomb craters made me wonder if perhaps one of the bombs had failed to explode.
A couple of weeks later, back in Aberdeen, I received a very nice email letting me know that following our conversation he had notified the authorities who had indeed found an unexploded bomb burrowed deep in the ground.
Visitor from a Parallel Universe | Who Was The Man from Taured?
Welcome to my life.
This is fun. Who knows what the real truth is? But, you know, powerful interests will generate cover stories to hide reality.
It’s why the US is panicking, because China is a competitor which the US has never seen.
Un like countries such as India, China has the ability and determination to advance;
on the other hand, unlike countries such as EU countries and Japan, China has a huge internal market to protect its companies from being sanctioned.
In a test video on Bilibili, they confirmed that the Mate 60 Pro is powered by the New Kirin 9000S, which was made in week 35 of 2020, in mainland China.
But the CPU is not the main character in Mate 60 Pro, since Kirin 9000S is only about the same as Snapdragon 888, the top performance 2 years ago.
It’s the BAW filter, or Bulk Acoustic Wave Filter. It was the key component for 5G communication, and the only part which the US could sanction Huawei’s cellphones. For a while, all Huawei cellphones used to have only 4G.
Silex Microsystems made a breakthough in BAW filter, and finally found the last piece of the puzzle.
Designed by Huawei, Silex, and other Chinese companies, made by SMIC.
U.S. Department of Commerce must be disappointed.
I guess it’s why Mate 60 Pro made a sudden appearence even without a press conference or any other event. It just quietly appeared in Huawei Stores and Huawei Online Shop.
The one who being the main drive of this sanction against Chinese companies is in China. Gina Raimondo is one of the most aggressive person in Biden administration to push a harder stance against China. She’s one of the most extreme eagles, if not the most extreme one.
Just like how Robert Gates was so sure that China wouldn’t be able to have a stealth fighter, China did the first test-flight during his visit in China in 2011.
It’s been 1041 days since Huawei released its last Kirin 9000.
It’s been 1566 days since Huawei being included into the entity list of US government.
With the massive domestic market, China was able to maintain Huawei’s operation. Now Chinese government and state-owned companies should choose only domestic computers, preferablly Huawei.
The US sanctions Huawei not because of its cellphones, but communication equipments.
The world was going to choose Huawei to deploy their 5G networks, and this would be a problem for the US government to spy other countries.
Therefore, even with no backdoor found, the UK eventually banned Huawei for security reasons and choose US companies which does have backdoors in their products.
The UK cannot say no to the US, because any British politician would want to stay longer in the politics club.
I see from your profile that you’re American. I am from Singapore.
I think it’s funny how an American is calling Singapore “dictatorial”, when the USA is the place where cops use equipment designed for military warfare; where cops regularly shoot people, especially black people, to death for minor offences; and which has one of the world’s highest incarceration rates (the USA comprises 4% of the world population, but holds 25% of its prisoners) and exploits prison labour in a way that the ACLU and Chicago Law School has described as a “fundamental abuse of human rights”; and models itself after Afghanistan when it comes to women’s rights to contraceptives and abortion. The USA treats gun ownership as a kind of human right, but not universal healthcare. Meanwhile, its leaders talk openly in Congress about invading its southern neighbour Mexico …
Well, maybe that is not so strange. After all, Kansas, Colorado, California, Utah, Arizona etc were all part of Mexico, before the USA brutally invaded it and took all that land away. “Dictatorial” is also not an inappropriate adjective to describe the genocidal acts which the white Americans inflicted on the Native Americans. Let’s not even go into the USA’s history of black slavery.
Meanwhile, Singapore is “dictatorial” because it bans commercial imports of chewing gum except for therapeutic purposes. LOL …
Gabon just SHOCKED the world with a coup, Africa breaking from Western rule
I wasn’t until I was living in China for a spell that I tried turtle.
As a food.
Don’t you know.
It tends to be a tad expensive, but is rather tasty. So I tend to only eat it on business occasions. It is served in a large dish, and the turtle is cut up into chunks.
When you get an opportunity, I suggest you give it a try. It’s sort of like “gator”, but not so chicken-like, rather it has its own unique flavor. I like it.
Goes great with white wine…
Phoenix, we are a problem
The performance gap is massive
Godfree Roberts Aug 29
Taiwanese microchip manufacturer TSMC blames struggle to build the Phoenix plant on skilled labor shortage but workers cite disorganization and safety concerns.
A former Wafertech employee told the Guardian that Wafertech told American employees they were all lazy in July 2023.
“We were in shock – and angry. The man that told us we were lazy during the all-employee meeting was the president of Wafertech at the time, Steve Tso,” they said.
“Anyone in the hi-tech world understands how tightly these processes are run. Nothing is done without a procedure in place. To say that there are no Americans to do this part of the job is nonsense.”
“This was constantly the whole process. Everything was rushed. They weren’t giving us actual blueprints, just engineer drawings. It felt like a design-as-we-go type of deal. The information we were getting was really strange, never complete, and always changing. We would get updates constantly and these were big updates to the point where we would have to start pulling things down.”
The Guardian.
Gods of Waters, Railroads and DamsEngineers have been China’s most esteemed professionals since in 256 BC, when Governor Li Bing designed and built the mighty Dujiangyan Irrigation Scheme.
It works as well today as it did in 256 BC, and a grateful people deified him so that today, he is known as God of Waters. Xi Jinping is a chemical engineer.
President Hu was a hydrological engineer. Skilled work crews in China – on railroads, skyscrapers, canals, dams or UHV lines – have 3-5 more years of math than their Western counterparts, can read engineer drawings, and can adapt them to local conditions where necessary.
An email from a friend – a director-level employee with an engineering background who has worked with multinational companies primarily based in the US – suggests that TSMC’s Phoenix problems may be symptomatic of a widening gap.
Why American manufacturing really moved to China
Dear Godfree,
Thank for asking. American manufacturing moved to China not because of dumb labor, but because we could hire high IQ people for dirt cheap.
If your machine broke down, no problem; some Chinese guy (with basically a masters in EE) would pull out the circuit boards and using probes and other instrumentation determine what board needed replacing and he would work for a fraction of the annual salary of his equivalent in the US.
Manufacturing in the US is a nightmare: at our US facility our only requirement for an assemblers was a high school degree, US citizenship, passing a drug and criminal background check and then passing a simple assembly test: looking at an assembly engineering drawing and then putting the components together.
The vast majority of Americans were unable to complete the assembly test, while for our facility in China they completed it in half the time and 100% of the applicants passed. An assembler position in the US would average maybe 30 interviews a day and get 29 rejections, not to mention all the HR hassles of assemblers walking off shift, excessive lateness, stealing from work, slow work speed and poor attitudes.
Our products are highly specialized equipment, so it makes no sense to fully automate it, most of the components are assembled by hand and for certain steps we use custom engineered jigs. And for those saying that the position wasn’t paying enough, it paid $12 an hour starting in an area with an extremely low cost of living where property taxes for a 2000 sq ft house is $800-$1000 a year.
Assemblers don’t make $150K. An assembler takes parts and puts them together. The position starts at $12 an hour in flyover country which is pretty reasonable compared to other jobs that only require a GED and no prior work experience.
Offers medical, dental and annual raises with plenty of opportunity to move up in the company.
The national average salary for a Production Assembler is $33,029 in the United States, which is what you make if you stay 5+ years.
Finding an American worker capable of meeting these simple requirements and passing the assembly test is merely impossible, nevermind having them be competent, punctual and of good moral character (not stealing from the company or starting conflicts with coworkers).
And these are the main groups that apply for this position.
The same exact product line has the same equipment in China, and the same positions in China pay the same wages as other positions there with only a high school degree and no work experience.
Yet the applicant quality is much higher, and this applies as well to the white collar professions that support the manufacturing: schedulers, quality inspectors, equipment testers and calibrators, engineers, supply chain managers, account managers, sales etc….their labor quality is simply higher. \…
I used to play math games in the car with my kids, son four and daughter, two and a half. I would say, ‘What is 2+3? My son would yell, ‘Five!’ I’d ask, what is 1+1? My daughter would hold up two fingers.
As months passed, the math games became harder and harder as they learned. One day, before my son was in kindergarten I meant to ask, ‘Whats 5–3?’ But it came out backwards, ‘Whats 3–5?’…
My son sat quietly for a moment looking perplexed. Then he yells, ‘Two on the other side of zero!’.
I almost crashed the car. He didn’t know how to say it correctly, but he had the grasp of negative numbers! At five years old! I was shocked and then scared with the reality of raising a kid that bright. He passed me intellectually by age ten or so in mathematical skills.
That was twenty years ago. He now works as an engineer for Tesla in the battery division. I’m a proud mommy!
Driving is ruining our lives
Our dependence on cars is harming us. Why did we give up public transportation for individual cars?
At 20, this nature-loving American was attacked by a tiger shark while surfing in Hawaii. He got away with hitting the shark repeatedly and then swimming as fast as he could to the beach. Result: 7 stitches in the thigh.
Probability of being attacked by a shark in the USA: one in 11.5 million chance.
A year later, Dylan is wild camping and, while he is sleeping in his tent, he is attacked by a brown bear which takes his head between its jaws… He gets out of it by digging his fingers into the eyes of the bear. ‘bear. Result: 9 staples to close the wounds on the scalp.
Probability of being attacked by a bear in the USA: one in 2.1 million chance.
A year later, Dylan is hiking in Utah and steps on a rattlesnake that bites him. As he is far from any hospital and he does not suffer too much, he decides to continue his hike. He feels bad for two days, but eventually regains his form.
Probability of being bitten by a snake in the USA: one in 37,500 chance.
Lifetime probability of being attacked by a shark, bear and snake: one in 894,000 trillion chance…
I got a call that my landlord would be coming to the property to take down the tumbleweeds in an area that I didn’t have access to. No problem, it wasn’t going to bother me.
About 15 minutes before they were supposed to arrive, a strange car pulls into my driveway and a man gets out and starts walking around the outside of the house. I had no idea who he was and immediately went out like a bat out of hell demanding to know who he was and why he had the audacity to be going in my backyard without my permission.
To my utter shock, he said he was a real estate agent and he was there to meet my landlord to put the property up for sale! I told him I had JUST renewed my lease for a year and why in the world would the landlord do this if he was going to sell the house???
Well, the landlord comes slinking up the driveway to find me VERY pissed off and tries to tell me that he and his wife were “only seeing what the property was worth” and that since he wanted to retire soon, they wanted to see what the value of the house would be. I told him he could have checked Zillow, but he finally fessed up that he really was planning on selling the house. I asked why he had just signed a one year lease, and come to find out that the landlord had told the property management company to put me on a month to month lease and they had screwed up.
I told him that it wasn’t my problem and that I would not be moving and good luck selling a house with a tenant that had a full year lease!
His wife finally came over and calmed things down between the two of us, and asked if I thought I could get a loan and buy the house myself. I had never thought about buying a home and never thought I would qualify, but I told him that on Monday I would check into it, and come to find out, I COULD buy the house!
We ended up working together without a real estate agent for either of us, and I closed on the house 30 days later! This was just one year ago and I locked in a great rate. He took almost $30,000 off the price so I could afford to buy the house and I am so thankful! Yes, he could have gotten $30,000 more but he knew how much I loved the house (I had lived there for four years and treated it as my home, including adding a beautiful garden) and he and his wife wanted to know that whoever bought it would love it and knew the history too.
I now own my home and couldn’t be happier. Had my landlord not felt so guilty about trying to sneak around to sell the place, he probably would have sold the place for an additional $30,000 to someone else!
R. Lee Ermey (1944–2018, RIP), was in the Marines from 1961 to 1972 and was a real drill instructor from 1965 to 1967 at the MCRD, San Diego, CA and his portrayal, most of which was improvised and spontaneous, was very accurate.
He was originally hired as a consultant, but, so impressed the movie’s director that he was given the part of the senior Drill Instructor represented by the black leather belt he wears in the movie.
The only inaccurate thing about the movie was that, as the drill instructor, he was a Gunnery Sgt., E-7.
This was very unusual and mostly unheard of for a GySgt. to be a drill instructor.
Also, we should have seen his two assistant drill instructors at certain point during the training.
The only time I ever saw a Gunnery Sgt., E-7 wearing a campaign cover was as a Series Gunnery Sgt. over a Series of four platoons.
In my 1028 Series, the Chief Drill Instructor was a Master Sgt. over 4 platoons (1028, 1029, 1030, 1031), but neither took any part in the everyday, hands-on training of the platoons under their command.
During Vietnam, the most common ranks for drill instructors were Corporal, E-4 and Sgt., E-5, with the not so common rank of Staff Sgt., E-6.
The second photo is of a young Corporal, E-4
Ermey when he was a drill instructor at MCRD San Diego, circa 1965. While in the Marines, he was sent to Vietnam in 1968 where he served for 14 months. He was medically retired in 1972 due to several injuries he received while in the Marines. In the photo of the medals on his dress blues, I do not see a Purple Heart, so I must assume his injuries were not received in battle. In the below photo of Ermey in his dress blues, the rank on his left shoulder is Gunnery Sgt., E-7. There are 2 hash marks on his left forearm. Each one represents 4 years. If he had made it to 12 years, he would have been authorized to wear three hash marks.
Marine drill instructors only have 12 weeks to mold a sloppy, immature, undisciplined civilian into a disciplined, squared away Marine and in most cases, has to undo 20 years of spoiled, entitled behaviors instilled by the parents that have kept him in perpetual boyhood. This cannot be accomplished with the same coddling treatment that the parents used in raising their son from a little boy to a big boy. The Marine’s first order of the day is to quickly destroy the boy in order to build the man. Everyday of training is important and there is not a moment to lose. A strong impression must be made by the drill instructors and shock and awe is the best way to leave a lasting impression. Fear of being yelled at, insulted or being punished is a very good incentive to learn, learn quick, retain what they learn and do well so as not to suffer the wrath of the drill instructor which has become the center of his world and the authority figure he most wants to please. I can tell you that it works. Semper Fi.
“DeDollarization Is IRREVERSIBLE” – Putin at BRICS Day One
A co-worker of mine figured out why her electric bill had tripled with the help of their neighbor’s cats. For three months one summer their electric bill suddenly went through the roof. They checked out all their appliances, air conditioning, etc. and couldn’t find the problem. Then one cool evening she looked out the window and noticed there were several neighbor cats lying on her driveway. This was an “Ah Ha!” moment. She had a driveway heater with a switch in the basement that was used very briefly when the driveway was icy in the winter. Turns out a workman who was doing a job in her basement was looking for a light switch and flipped on the driveway heater switch. When no light came on, the guy figured that light was broken and found a different light, The driveway switch wasn’t labeled (at least not then). So her driveway had been continuously drawing electricity all summer. Only the neighbor cats could detect the difference in temperature on the driveway and would “chill out” there on cool evenings. It took her 3 months to notice the abundance of cats lying on her driveway and connect that with the driveway heater and the high electric bill.
Alfred Nobel created the Nobel Prize near the end of his life as a public relations move. He’d invented dynamite for mining and construction. But people used it as a weapon, killing thousands, and earning him the label, “The Merchant of Death”.
There was Alfred Binet, who invented the IQ test, with the intention of classifying children who need assistance. His test unintentionally fueled the eugenics movement and was a key tool for discrimination.
There was Alfred Vanderbilt, who was one of the world’s wealthiest young men and most eligible bachelor. He narrowly avoided boarding the Titanic, canceling his trip at the last moment. Unfortunately, three years later, he boarded the Lusitania, which was sunk by German U-boats.
And then there is my friend, Al.
Al was a fellow swimmer. He was 6’3, easygoing, and per my female friend “handsome enough”. He had a good sense of humor and straw-like brown hair that was ravaged by chlorine. Al had squeaked through high school and landed an athletic scholarship at our university.
His father was a volatile alcoholic, the type who sings karaoke and is everyone’s best friend in the first hour of drinking, and a belligerent monster for the remaining six.
I saw it firsthand when he came to town for a swim meet, which he overslept and missed. Al invited me to dinner, which was a bit unusual for “parent’s weekend”. I suspect he didn’t want to endure it alone. Sure enough, his dad showed up at Applebees at 6 PM and was already blitzed, full of stupid ideas, and making inane, brutally awkward attempts to flirt with our waitress.
He was a walking meme, stopping just short of wearing a varsity jacket and bragging about his high school touchdowns.
It was a long two-hour dinner. I walked through the parking lot, exhausted, and immediately knew why Al had never touched alcohol. Then I winced, remembering the scene of me holding a cup of beer up to his face, playfully saying, “Just one sip … c’mon.”
As we walked to the car, I asked, with a bit of hesitation, “So is your mom…more…normal?”
“She was. Yes.”
“Was?” I instinctively asked, thinking she’d become an alcoholic too.
“She died when I was 9. Ovarian cancer.”
I nodded and got quiet, realizing this ridiculously nice guy had probably endured a terrible childhood. I knew his sister had left home at 12 to live with his grandmother for reasons unnamed.
Al noticed me looking bummed out and gave me a half smile, “Dude. It’s OK. I’m all good.” I suppose he didn’t want my pity. He’d probably gotten enough of that already.
One month later
Our college swim team was doing a mixer party with the women’s lacrosse team. It was fun — your typical party scene, with lots of laughing, talking, and loud music. It looked just like those American parties you’ve seen in movies.
A few girls were walking around in lacrosse pads. One teammate was shamelessly walking around in a speedo and goggles, with a beer bong poised at the ready.
Eventually, the night turned south as it often does with so much drinking. A couple of the lacrosse girls’ boyfriends had become jealous of this mixer. They showed up to start trouble, trying to push through the front door. There was a bunch of shouting. No fists were thrown thankfully. But a few girls began crying and fighting with their partners. It was a total vibe kill.
We decided to get out of there before things got worse. Two of us left with Al around midnight, who was the DD as always. He dropped us both off that night and I thought nothing of it.
The next morning, I got an ominous text, “Did, you hear about Al?”
Al had been hit by a drunk driver on the way back to his house. He’d been T-boned at high speed on his driver-side door. He was in the hospital with a broken leg, collar bone, shoulder, and two broken ribs.
He was alive. He’d walk fine. But his shoulder was never right again and his swimming career was over. I stopped by to see him and he looked like a shell of himself on the hospital bed.
His eyes were sunken, hair disheveled, and hanging over his swollen face. We hung out and talked for a bit. He was out of it from the pain meds and fell asleep mid-conversation. I saw his dad at the hospital, sober for once.
The good news is that life went on as normal. He eventually returned to class and hung out with us. But not without great cost to him.
Al didn’t have the prestigious accolades of history’s famous Alfreds. In fact, his background was mostly the opposite: absent of wealth, stability, and the type of love a kid needs. He inherited and then endured great misfortune.
In fact, there was a time when I thought Al was the most unlucky guy I’d ever met. I was sure he’d break at any moment. How couldn’t he?
He’s gone on to be quite successful, have kids, and a loving wife. And despite all the hardship, he’s always had a great attitude. He has lived in defiance of the groundwork for so much sorrow.
I know many others, who are born into relative privilege and spared of major tragedies, myself included, who have struggled to appreciate their life at times.
My father-in-law is one of the happiest men I know, despite having a troubled and turbulent childhood. He is a big storyteller and relays everything interesting from his life. Yet he has a DMZ line drawn on his childhood. We know nothing. That’s how bad it was.
People forget that luck, good or bad, is all a construct. It isn’t actually a proven thing — in the sense of a mystical universe choosing favorites among us. Luck is just probability playing out in real time. For us, it’s more accurately defined as how humans choose to describe their lives.
It’s also a decent proxy for how people frame their problems. For example, those who believe in good or bad luck tend to be more cynical and less happy.
The name Alfred isn’t intrinsically unlucky. I just looked up a bunch of Alfreds from history and cherry-picked those who’d had the most bad luck. It was a whimsical way of framing a trajectory. Because each person has a narrative they tell themselves of their life story.
I’ve heard from many readers and people over the years, who had horrible childhoods and lives — on paper — yet have gone on to be quite happy.
I’ve tended to downgrade my definition of problems as life has improved (another pesky byproduct of hedonic adaptation). Yesterday, I caught myself cursing up a storm while setting up a new soundbar. You’d have thought I just caught someone cheating on me. I’d lost sight of how first-world, and truly spoiled I sounded.
It is in the quieter moments, when sleep is evasive, that the mind can wander and wallow in misery and egregious mistakes. I am reminded that happiness and contentment requires intent. Life is messy and complicated, and one cannot feel better simply by comparing themselves to those less fortunate. It takes more work.
It is a sense of presence in the moment, gratitude, perspective, lifestyle, community, and purpose that I have found the most happiness, as my unlucky friend Al did.
But he’ll be the first to tell you how lucky he is.
Saudi Arabia Joins BRICS (The New Global Order & Silver)
The true core of BRICS will consist of China, Russia and Iran, with elites that are nationalist and in the case of China and Iran also heavily socialist.
Russia still operates with much of the neoliberal inheritance of the 1990s, even within the minds of many of its ruling elite. The Ukraine conflict, and the resultant Western sanctions, has facilitated a significant decolonization of the Russian mind and a rebalancing of state-oligarch relations in favour of the latter. These three nations have the potential to dominate Central Asia (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan), Belarus, Iraq, and Syria; with the aid of the overlapping Shanghai Cooperation Council (SCO) security alliance. Linking together a huge landmass that contains the greatest global manufacturing power, the second greatest global military power, and colossal natural resource deposits. This is the true core of the challenge to the West, perhaps we can call it BRICISSTAN. Mongolia represents an independent variable, but simple geography and trade flows will mean that it never becomes an enemy.
For this challenge to be successful it requires at the least the non-alignment of the rest of the non-West, and their usage of the new multi-polar world to rebalance they economic relations with the West to their advantage. Such non-alignment was shown with respect to the Western sanctions upon Russia, where the Rest of the World (ROW) refused to be part of the Western attempt to subjugate Russia. In ASEAN (the Association of South East Asian Nations) plus Bangladesh and Pakistan, China has a grouping that will be at least non-aligned, with some nations such as Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia being much closer to China. The underlying dynamic of Chinese demand and respect for sovereignty will continue to pull ASEAN toward China, no matter what the West does. The latter is doing as much as possible to disrupt this process, with widespread interference in the elections in Malaysia and Thailand and support for Western-comprador forces in Myanmar (greatly aided by India), but its efforts will come to nought; with Chinese patience and restraint paying dividends.
India, the “I” in BRICS will never be a truly anti-imperial force as its ruling class are fully neoliberal, with many educated in the West. This elite treats China as a regional competitor that must be resisted, and with a mindset that protects its national rentier profit-making. This combination has repeatedly led India to cut off its nose to spite its face, with Chinese (and other foreign) companies treated in highly arbitrary ways that stifle the ability of India to utilize Chinese (and other nation’s) help for national development. India will remain as a developing nation, never to repeat the Chinese (and South Korean, and Taiwanese, and ongoing Vietnamese) growth and development miracle. India’s long-term alliance with Russia will mitigate its relationship with BRICISSTAN, but India will always be a prickly neighbour that will look to work with the US against China when it sees advantage. In many ways, India’s geopolitical role resembles that of Turkey under Erdogan.
South Africa, the “S” in BRICS is a neoliberal fun house run by an ANC traitorous elite that turned its back on the masses of the Black population to massively enrich itself in cahoots with the white national capitalists and Western capital. If any nation has truly implemented the story of Animal Farm it is South Africa. “All [black people] are equal, but some [black people] are more equal than others” and “[socialists] good, [capitalists even white ones] better” seems befitting of current South Africa. The Black elite may very well exercise a level of nationalism, but they will never be socialist brothers. This is where the RIC respect for national sovereignty and political non-interference becomes such a weapon to wield against the neo-colonial ever-interfering West. To stretch a saying of Deng, the RIC must make friends with socialist, capitalist, and even medieval theocratic monarchic cats to overcome the West; but it must also be wary of the non-socialist cats.
Brazil, the “B” in BRICS, is a nation dominated by the elites that it was bequeathed at the time of independence. A poisoned chalice that, as I have written here, here and here, provides a disabling legacy for Latin America. There are a few nations that have fully or partially escaped that legacy, mainly Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Bolivia, but for the vast majority the comprador landed, and financial domestic elites dominate. As I have covered here, the very best of Lula was “neoliberalism with crumbs” and the most recent reincarnation is certainly not the best version. He will tread very carefully with respect to the West, being seen more to hold the coat of the RIC than directly engage in the duel. The Latin American comprador elites are simply looking for improved prices for their exports, and a bit more leeway in their exploitation of their populations, by working with the RIC. Argentina, which is swaying back to the right from a mildly progressive government very much reflects that reality.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE are medieval-style monarchies that claim their nation’s wealth for themselves, but they have smelt the wind and notice the new way that it is blowing. Together with the cooperation with Russia and Iran within OPEC+, they are more forcefully pivoting to the RIC (with Saudi Arabia and Qatar becoming an observer of the SCO); reflecting their interests with their fellow OPEC+ members and the biggest market for the fossil fuel exports, while turning away from Western divide and conquer tactics. Due to the Western inability to stop interfering in the domestic politics of its “allies”, Egypt has started to drift away from the Western sphere (including observer status at the SCO) ; but again, we must remember the nature of its leadership. Ethiopia does seem to be a state that under its new leadership is attempting to turn away from the West and gain the alternative financing and help that it needs to do so. Given its location in the Horn of Africa opposite Saudi Arabia, its geopolitical positioning will affect the whole region.
The West is utterly dependent on its ability to source raw materials from the Rest at knockdown prices, keep them underdeveloped so that they provide a good market for Western exports, and steal the value added produced by the Rest through unequal trading and legal relationships backed up by technology controls. This avenue has already been shut down in Russia and Iran (mostly be the West’s own self-harming sanctions), and China is increasingly moving up the technology curve and gaining a greater share of its own value added; the real reason for Western aggression. As especially China expands its increasingly sophisticated exports around the world, imports more and more from the Rest, and funds development projects, the flow of cheap resources and value-added to the West is reduced. In the Middle East, China and Russia are working with Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States to remove their dependence upon the US dollar and Western financial system. The capitalist centre is slowly strangled. In the Middle East and Africa, Russia also provides hired military muscle to facilitate the success of nations such as Niger in rebalancing their economic relations with the West.
RIC and BRICISSTAN do not need Brazil, India or South Africa as full allies against the West, they simply need them (as with the rest of the ROW) to not be enemies and to utilize multipolarity to rebalance their economic and financial relations with the West. Without the neo-colonial flows of plunder to the West, the capitalist centre will be strangled into a slow collapse with no need for war. The over-sized Western elite response to the coup in Niger shows that they are very cognizant of this possibility, but they may also be becoming more conscious of their inability to stop it happening. The failure of the Western comprador ECOWAS to mount a military campaign against Niger in the face of popular resistance in their own nations is a marker to which way the wind is blowing.
So, we do not need to be disappointed when Brazil, India and South Africa and others show their unwillingness to become true partners of BRICISSTAN. All we need of them is to stand aside from the duel and use it to rebalance their relations with the West to their advantage. This by itself will help bring the Western house down.
Pepe Escobar: The Prigozhin Era Is GONE | MOATS with George Galloway Ep 267
Choosing to be debt free and being able to walk around without spending money isn’t a lifestyle reserved for the wealthy — it’s for people who make a conscious decision to live within their means.
Some friends of mine are a young couple in their early 30’s with a combined income of $65,000 per year, and own their home outright (no mortgage), have no car payments or credit cards, have money in their savings account, and are building up for retirement.
How? By being smart with their money and avoiding things like credit cards and walking around with cash. Almost half of their income goes straight to their savings every month.
Instead of buying new cars and having a car payment, they saved for a few months and bought used cars they could write a check for. Instead of getting a 30 year mortgage on the biggest house they could afford, they rented a small apartment for the first four years they were together so they could save up to buy some land. They paid cash for their land, set up a well, power, and septic, and then bought an RV trailer and parked it there to live in while they saved up to build their dream house.
By doing this, they eliminated the monthly cost of their apartment and were literally living for free in that RV on land they owned outright. And they were smart about the next step too – every month, whatever money was to go in their savings went toward a step in the build process of their home. One month it was a concrete foundation, a couple months later it was buying some of the timbers, framing, plumbing, electrical, etc. One step at a time, as they could afford to do it.
Eventually the house was ready to move into – still not “finished”, the interior walls and flooring weren’t done, but the roof was up, the windows and doors were in, and it was livable. So they sold the RV, almost for what they paid for it, and spent the cash from that to finish the interior and did most of the work themselves. I chipped in a little myself — woodworking is a hobby of mine and I helped them build their cabinets.
The whole build process took almost five years from start to finish. But in that five years of sacrifice, they built their dream home and will never have a monthly house payment. They’re in their early 30’s and are further ahead financially than most people making three times their income.
Imagine being their age and never having a house payment again, ever. Imagine being able to write a check when it’s time for a new car instead of having to finance it. Imagine having half or more of your paycheck going straight to your savings account instead of going out the door to monthly payments on debt.
You don’t have to be rich to live that way. You just have to plan for it, and be disciplined enough not to buy things you can’t afford with money you don’t have.
Scott Ritter: “The CIA is working directly with Ukraine” | Redacted News
Scott Ritter is a former UN Weapons Inspector who exposed the lies in Iraq. He told the world that Saddam Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. Powerful people in Washington didn’t want to hear it and he resigned in protest. The War in Iraq cost millions of lives and trillions of dollars. Now Ritter is revealing the truth about the latest U.S. military incursions in Ukraine, Syria, and beyond.
Biden Greeted With Extremely HOSTILE Response In Maui
President Joe Biden took a few hours away from his vacation in Lake Tahoe to visit the fire-devastated island of Maui, and the reception was, well, let’s say lukewarm. Chants of “Fuck you!” greeted the presidential motorcade before Biden attended a few events to acknowledge the suffering Hawaiians at which he made his typically tone-deaf or otherwise insensitive comments.
Every store is CLOSED in Oakland
440,000 people call Oakland home ,but their stores are rapidly closing We are walking downtown Oakland to witness the city through a camera’s lens Market street
It was the year 1931, Plennie L. Wingo was discussing with his friends ways to make money, his friends told him that everything had already been done, that the one who made money did and the one who didn’t should settle, to which he after thinking about it for a few seconds, he replied:
“Not everything is done, nobody has gone around the world…”
His friends interrupted him and laughed in unison, telling him that this was very hackneyed, that many people had tried it and to forget it.
To which he replied:
“I repeat, no one has gone around the world… walking backwards”
That idea, as silly as it was, for some reason stuck with him.
That is how in that same year, on April 15, he bought some glasses with mirrors to see in reverse and began his journey. While doing his feat, he lived off the generosity of the people he met along the way, getting paid to sign newspapers in which he appeared and occasionally stopping in a town to work for a few weeks and continue on his way.
Although he could not achieve his mission, since in Turkey they told him that he could not pass and would have to return to North America, he ended up traveling 13 thousand kilometers, became internationally famous, appearing in shows and even publishing his own book.
Plennie L. Wingo, the man who became famous for walking eight thousand miles on his back, which was completely absurd, but in the end it worked for him.
Being poor is not determined by education, mental health, some status of “deserving it” or what have you.
I am a top writer on Quora a couple years running now, and I live under the poverty line.
I was rear ended by a drunk driver some years back. The subsequent series of health crises drained my bank accounts, savings and 401K, because that’s how our health system is designed.
It was only after my assets were reduced under $2000 that I was eligible for public health benefits. I will never be allowed to have over $2000 in assets again, so it’s highly unlikely I will ever escape poverty. I was at one point the VP of Marketing and Business Development of the 3rd fastest growing private company in Oregon, listed on a couple Inc. indices. I was, at the time of the accident, the founding executive director of The Tor Project.
My then boyfriend — who was scrambling to keep me, my elderly mom with Parkinson’s and Lewy body dementia, and my teenage son afloat, with me as primary breadwinner out of commission — didn’t know to look at Quicken to see how much of the bank account was sequestered to pay taxes when I got taken out on April Fool’s Day. So I will never be able to pay off my tax debt, and never be able to have a bank account again.
Living in this country without a bank account is hell.
I have all kinds of illness and mobility disabilities, and live in subsidized elder/disability housing. But these people don’t take the stored value card I get my social security on, as payment for rent.
So I have to physically get myself to the post office, and pay to have a money order cut and mailed to them. When I am too ill to get myself there by the 5th, I can pay an extra $50 in rent on my tiny studio apartment. That’s a 20% surcharge on my rent, because I’m ill. And I’m in this place, because I’m ill. I’ve asked my social worker if I can get assistance with this, and I’ve been told that I can not unless I sign all of my financial affairs over to a representative of the State. I frankly feel uncomfortable with that.
I can still write, but not consistently enough for people to pay me. I have a Patreon. Social Security makes it hard for people who don’t get a consistent paycheck, who work when they are on SSI, who don’t fit a cookie cutter “work in a bakery on night shift” disability job.
I spend about half my days in bed, immobile and in pain. I would love more than anything to be working again at a job that I loved. But my body won’t allow it. They even put me on opioids for a bit before the epidemic became a known thing, and I weaned myself off of them and live with the pain, because on the drugs, I could not read and write and my life was one continual useless meaningless fog.
Most of my neighbors here in subsidized housing are lovely people who have to deal with a small minority of terrible people who end up here and make things hard for all of us. Those people are the only ones that you probably think of when you think of poor people, just as when one might think of persons of a particular religion many people think only of religious extremists.
Similarly, the greatest harm done by the bad actors among the poor is done to other poor people, statistically. We have checks stolen, packages stolen, assaults, rapes in poor neighborhoods, but most often among people who know each other. In proportion, mugging of strangers and other things that people who are not poor fear are incredibly rare.
But what the priority that police provide is not enforcement, but containment, because they know who is paying their salaries, and their time is limited.
When I grew up poor and rural in central Vermont, there was no shame in being poor, and to a certain extent there is still far less stigma in rural areas. So long as you are neatly put together and clean, and respectful, there’s nothing to set you below any other American.
In the cities, however, being poor seems to be treated as though it were a contagion, and a shame, like leprosy in the Bible, like a venereal disease, like AIDS is, undeservedly, shunned.
This is a shame on our country as a whole, and makes us less able to create a resilient culture in hard times. And, in case you hadn’t noticed — not being poor — these are hard times.
Empathy is a virtue.
Saudi Accept China Bid for Nuclear Plant | U.S. Is Worried
Explore the intriguing dynamics between Saudi Arabia and China as they contemplate a joint venture in nuclear technology. This deep dive analyzes the geopolitical implications for the United States, India, and the broader West Asian region. Join us for a comprehensive breakdown of these unfolding events.
Yes, my father. He went into a nursing home after a fall and brain beed. I had to handle selling his house and cleaning it out.
I found a file labeled “dirt”. Inside was paperwork related to his response to my mom’s request in 1973 for an increase in child support. Now I found copies of his letter to a friend where he bragged about how his income had tripled since their divorce in ‘68, when his support was set at $150 total for 3 kids. So he was prosperous 5 years later.
Mom’s 2nd husband committed suicide Jan ’73 and times were tough. She lost her job 2 months after. Bad recession. She was wrecked. We were on food stamps and she was picking up temp work when she could get it. Food was rationed. AC wasn’t turned on until June, in Florida. No luxuries. Oldest sister married and moved out so support was cut to $100 for 2. Then it was 1974 and this support request was being dragged out.
Dad wrote Mom a letter saying how her situation was unfortunate but not his problem, and that he had a new wife, and she and her 4 kids from 1st marriage and deadbeat ex husband were his first priority now. And he added that I and my sister could help support ourselves. He made a lot of accusations against Mom and threatened to report her to the government for some kind of fraud, which I think was bogus. Mom had no money for a lawyer so the issue was dropped.
Sis and I were underage teenagers and the same ages as 2 of his step kids. He wasn’t confiscating their pay from any pt jobs they had, and later some of them got private college education at least partially funded by him.
Bless my mom, she didn’t ever tell us anything and never asked us to turn over our meager earnings. She found better work and we got off food stamps. We did have to fully fund our cars we eventually bought, and any luxuries. She was teaching us how to adult. She totally took the high road.
So now I have to dutifully take care of my father’s needs and handle his finances and paperwork and visit occasionally, knowing how little he cared about us. We had sensed the discard and how little he cared, but it sucked reading confirmation of it. My oldest sister wants nothing to do with him for other reasons.
Oh, and he’s on Medicaid because he blew through his retirement savings too soon and that now ex wife with the 4 kids went to court and got almost all the equity from his house to cover unpaid alimony. He actually tried to order me to move him from the nursing home into my home, but nfw. I’m not going to live with his alcoholic ass and disrupt my life when he didn’t give a shit about us when we were going through a terribly hard time.
Rich Men North of Richmond – Fiddle Version – Oliver Anthony and Philip Bowen
As someone who’s been the duty manager in a casino where people have won a similar amount to that referred to by the question setter, I’ll tell you exactly what does happen.
This person won’t be a stranger to us. UK casinos don’t function like that. So we’ll know this person. Chances are they’ve lost several million with us over the years. So we won’t be surly. We’ll be professionally happy for the winning player. Handshakes all round. I’ll ask if they fancy having dinner with me in the casino restaurant, or perhaps share a bottle of something suitably lovely.
We want you to come back to us next time. That sentence is the most important factor in the whole process. If you win and there’s people around you being happy for you, then you’re more likely to return. The table staff also want you to tip, or continue tipping. They’ll be very happy for you too.
So after the handshakes and pleasant meal, I’ll sign the cheque made up by the cashier. More likely nowadays is the BACS transfer back to their account. But not all 8 million. Maybe only 5 or 6. The other 2 million they’ll leave on deposit with us. (Always their choice. Never suggested. Never needs to be suggested). I mean, after all, they’re in town for a few more days and may want to play again. We can always BACS that 2 million whenever they ask us to.
Once all the financials are done, I will personally escort Mr/Ms. Big Winner up to one of our waiting chauffeured cars, where they will be taken to wherever they so desire. They may even hold onto our car and driver, in case they fancy popping back our way in the next couple of hours. Of course sir, no problem at all.
And all this time, at every interaction I have with the player, we’ll be discussing how their particular business is doing – did their daughter’s recent wedding go well – how’s their son finding business school – we have some tickets to the sporting / cultural event they’re interested in. All this is in their file.
So that’s what happens. It may sound a little oily and rehearsed, but it’s just business.
Elon Musk: “Oumuamua Has Suddenly Returned and It’s Not Alone!”
Yeah. They have been talking about this is China too.
Let me share a perspective that might be controversial in China. Many of us, especially among the Han Chinese, feel that it was the people of Tibetans and Uyghurs who wanted to be with us more than we wanted to be with them. We contribute with our taxes to support those people, and some feel that we don’t receive equivalent benefits in return.
If you ever consider supporting them, please understand that it may involve significant financial commitments. Without it, Tibetans and Uyghurs might not be industrious or eager for independence. If you want to pour your money as much as we do, nobody will stop you, You are more than welcome. Remember saying something is always cheap, show them your wallet.
And Japan?
It is really funny. You know the US doesn’t want Japan to be strong, and neither does the whole world. You can ask the people of Hong Kong and Taiwan. They want to be a little bit far away from China, but it doesn’t mean that they want to be with you. Even if people in China, disagree with the CCP, they will communicate with the CCP, instead of standing with you.
You know your situation, don’t you?
You Japan is the enemy of the US, China, Russia, Korea… Almost all of the big and strong countries in the world.
You Japan did so many bad things during WWII, You don’t apologize for it, you don’t regret it. And now you are trying to isolate China? How could you be so stupid? And where does your confidence come from?
Ask the people to betray China to be with you Japan? A dirty country like Japan? Are you out of your mind?
This Is How Xi Jinping Is Kicking The US Out And Making China A Global Superpower And Peace-Make
The shield wall isn’t that effective in and of itself. Shield walls are not very maneuverable, and smart riders can still get up close to them and try to find a weak point (or flank.)
A man and his full war gear might weigh 200 pounds. You know what weighs a lot more? A horse. Horses will trample people. Even killing the horse in front of you doesn’t stop the momentum.
That sheer momentum is part of why cavalry charges can be so devastating.
No, the part about shield walls that does anything to cavalry is the pikes:
Horses are not machines; they have a brain in their head. They will not willingly skewer themselves on pikes. The reason pikes are so effective if they stay in formation is because the horses won’t charge into that. If you break formation, different story. Then you get a one way ticket to trample town.
It was extremely common for a line of Pikemen in the Middle Ages, upon facing charging knights, to soil themselves and run away, not necessarily in that order. Against fleeing or disorganized enemies, cavalry is lethal. That’s where all the casualties happen. (And it’s why they often come from the flanks.)
What stops the charge once they’ve made contact is the guys behind the front ranks. The men up front can’t go anywhere. The guys in the back can choose to push back or flee. A warhorse, for all its mass, can’t do much in a solid crowd of human bodies resisting them. It’s when they break and flee, and thus loosen up the center and then front of the formation, that everything goes down hill.
It sounds easy- just stand firm and the horses can’t rout you! But it wasn’t until professional armies, particularly professional infantry, became common that the hyper dominance of knights faded. Because I promise you, when faced with incoming knights – trained murder machines – you would start getting real freaking nervous. Shields themselves won’t stop cavalry: formation and discipline does.
(And then the professional infantry realized they could just charge each other with their pikes. Eventually, guns developed enough to put a stop to that insanity.)
I don’t think Westerners would EVER want to adopt the family tree naming convention based on “Chinese culture”.
Why?
Well the obvious reason is because it isn’t their culture 🙂
And secondly, nobody, NOBODY would want to add a galaxy’s worth of complexity into their lives.
The Chinese family tree doesn’t just take generation and biological sex into account.
It also takes into account:
Maternal and Paternal Lineage
Marriage
Relative Age
Consanguinity (the fact of being descended from the same ancestor)
etc.
See the “Complicated Chinese Family Tree” below.
So, how would you address your mother’s older brother? He’s not just your “Uncle”. He is your 舅舅 (Jiùjiu).
And his oldest son who’s older than you? He’s not just your “Cousin”. He is your 表哥 (Biǎo gē).
Okay, then how about your father’s younger brother? He’s not just your “Uncle”. He is your 叔叔 (Shūshu).
And his youngest daugher who is younger than you? She’s not just your “Cousin”. She is your 堂妹 (Táng Mèi).
If you look at all this and you think it is hard – well, yes, that is because it is hard. As a kid, my dad would GRILL me before any extended family gathering.
If I got the appellation for any family member during this Grilling Session wrong, his face would be a mask of disappointment. If I got it wrong when actually addressing family members – he would correct me on the spot, in front of EVERYONE, while shaking his head in disappointment.
As a kid, being corrected in front of ALL your extended family members, with your dad looking on at you in disappointment, while some of your extended family members perhaps laughing and chuckling at your mistake… it’s not a fun thing, I can assure you.
Mortifying. That’s the word. Absolutely, completely, totally mortifying.
Who would want to willingly add this much complexity into their lives?
It must be so, so, so refreshing just to be able to say “Uncle” or “Aunt” or “Cousin” without having to worry about which side of the family they’re on, whether they’re your mom or dad’s older or younger sibling, whether this person is older or younger than you, who they’re married to, etc.
As a kid, I was like – “Why can’t I just call him Uncle?”
My dad – “Because you’re Chinese.”
AMERICA IS WORRIED! China Will Build 8 Overseas Military Bases in The Future
Saving Momma
15 floors, in this case.
This guy
scaled a 19-storey building just to save his mother.
And he did that with an injured hip.
West Philadelphia. 2019.
His mother was at the hospital, unwell and bedridden. A fire breaks out on the lower floors. He gets a call from his sister telling him their Momma’s stuck in the hospital and it’s on fire.
He races to that building’s entrance, only to be told by police officers who were on the scene, barring the entrance, that it was too dangerous to let anybody in.
He didn’t let that stop him, he climbed up.
On the 15th floor he found her safe on a balcony. She told him she was told by police over the phone not to move from there as the fire was being contained.
Appeased, at ease that she was okay, he climbed back down. The fire was taken care of and eventually his mother and others were able to leave the building.
“I took it upon myself because that’s my mother. There’s no limits. That’s my mother.”
Do you realize if Trump goes to prison, America is truly not a free country anymore?
Oh! One guy might go to prison and all of a sudden you’re worried that America isn’t “free” anymore?
Well, I’ve got some news for you.
America currently incarcerates 664 of every 100,000 people living in the country. Millions more are on probation or are suffering some sort of civil disability because of having a criminal record. For example, in New York State, people with a felony conviction aren’t allowed to become barbers.
If you want to say “America sends too many people to jail” I would heartily agree with you. However, if you’re complaining that some idiot who tried a harebrained scheme to overturn an election he lost by a wide margin proves America isn’t “free”, you’re about 40 years too late.
John Dean spent more time in prison than any other person involved in Watergate, and he was the guy who first blew the whistle on the operation.
Personally, at age 66 , I’ve eliminated stress by making three major changes in my life. Firstly, eliminating all friends and family members who were unnecessarily stressed, and unfairly imposing that stress into my life. Secondly, I stopped earning money in a manner which was extremely stressful, and resulted in an unhealthy lifestyle. Thirdly, I started going to the gym, and began lowering my Resting Heart Rate, through a vigorous training program.
Ultimately, for myself, it was all about changing three major components of my lifestyle. My social life, my employment, and my health.
I can think of a lot of things, but I’ll just focus on one: a lopsided allocation of resources away from advanced/gifted, middle-or-upper income, able-bodied students with stable home lives.
That is, the more academic, mental, social, economic, or familial challenges a student has, the more resources school districts will allocate towards them. But, in a world of finite resources, that means that the students who don’t have those challenges have resources taken from them.
For example: In the early 2000s, a paraprofessional at a public high school in the Chicago suburbs. I was hired to help exactly one student. That student had cerebral palsy and was quadriplegic. He was of average intelligence, but he had no realistic chance of ever living alone. He had a very slight chance of finding some sort of job that would pay him enough to where he could be taxed on it. But, in all likelihood, he would spend his entire life relying on others to do everything for him.
It wasn’t his fault, of course. And yes, he still deserved an education. He was a cool guy. We got along great. I just checked, and I can’t find anything online about him from the last 13 years. His parents would be well into their 70s by now, so I’m guess that, if he’s still alive, he’s living in a group home somewhere.
Anyway, back then, I made $36k annually helping that one single student. That’s the equivalent of about $63k today.
And I was one of over a dozen paraprofessionals at that one school, each working with one student with similar struggles. I know for a fact that at least three of those students didn’t live past 25, due to their conditions.
Now imagine if schools spent equivalent resources on the students on the opposite end of the challenge spectrum. Imagine if, for every student who needed a 1:1 paraprofessional just to get through the day, the school hired a gifted education tutor to help challenge the academically advanced students. Imagine if, in addition to a special education resource room for students with challenges, each school also had a gifted education resource room, for students for whom the regular education options were too easy.
That could apply to areas outside of academics as well. Have a student who is an athletic or artistic or musical prodigy? Why shouldn’t the school hire someone to help them reach their full potential, the way they hire people to help students with challenges?
“Child prodigies” aren’t all that rare. They’re just advanced students whose parents had the resources to help them succeed. If schools started providing those resources to all advanced students, we’d see a lot more “child prodigies.” And, ultimately, a lot more adults whose contributions to society went beyond “making those around them feel better about themselves for being empathetic and inclusive.”
Americans, Australian, Canadians and a few of the so called alliances were willing to slaughtering and being hypocritical and pretentious. But more than that for me it is a tinge of racism. They the soldiers are slaughtering coloured people that they don’t have affiliation or affinity to.
Let us call a spade a spade. The world knows the U.S. lead in slaughter of 2 million in Korea, 3 million in Vietnam, 1 million in Manila and 1 million Muslims in Mindanao Philippines, 2 million in Iraq and 1 million in Afghanistan and it is not over yet… the U.S. will kill and kill and kill. They will justify some shit like pretentious democracy or freedom.
But the culling will continue till one day they pick in the wrong nation like China and their world go up in nuclear dust!
Almost 20 years ago, my then husband (now ex-), who was verbally and emotionally quite abusive, was ripping my face off with an enraged tirade. I was sitting on the sofa, with my face leaning on the palms of my hand, waiting for the tirade to be over.
Then I heard a pitty-pat of paws and I looked up to see my Skittles came from the bedroom into the living room, where we were.
She sat down in front of me and my ex (who had not noticed her and kept screaming his rage). Skittles looked first at me, then at him, then at me, then at him again. And then she let out a VERY angry meow/hiss/growl AT MY EX, all without leaving her spot.
It was a very, very clear message: “Knock off being so verbally violent to mom!”
My ex jumped from the sofa completely startled, looked at the cat and said, “OK!”
He then resumed his tirade in much, much milder tones, finished off very soon after and then left.
That cat had defended me like a dog.
Then and there, in my mind, I promised her I would always take care of her. And I did. Skittles was with me for 13 years and she was my best friend. Could not have had a better cat.
Through his distinguished career in science fiction, Sir Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008) was known both for writing the hardest of hard science fiction stories and novels and also for visionary far-future stories showing the influence of Olaf Stapledon. But there were more sides to Sir Arthur, as in the humorous stories he collected in Tales from the White Hart, and in his being a fan of celebrated horror writer H.P. Lovecraft (“[H]is best stories were masterpieces in their genre,” Clarke wrote in a letter to fantasy master Lord Dunsany), which led to his writing, early in his career, “At the Mountains of Murkiness,” a Lovecraft parody. “A Walk in the Dark” is definitely not a parody, and starts out apparently in Clarke’s best hard science vein, but gradually takes a sinister turn. A distinguished science fiction editor once wrote that the first story she read by Clarke, when she was very young, was this one, and it frightened her so much that it was years before she could bring herself to read anything else with his name on it. Of course, the typical reader isn’t going to grow up to be an editor, and can probably handle this story. Right after they make sure all the lights are on and check the batteries in their flashlight . . .
Known for being one of the “Big Three” writers of modern science fiction (with Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov), co-author of and technical advisor for the now-classic movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, author of many best-selling novels, commentator on CBS’s coverage of the Apollo missions, and winner of numerous awards, Sir Arthur C. Clarke surely needs no introduction (though I just snuck one in anyway). In a technical paper in 1945, he was first to describe how geosynchronous satellites could relay broadcasts from the ground around the world”., bringing a new era in global communications and television. His novels are too numerous to list here (but I’ll plug three of my favorites: The City and the Stars, Childhood’s End, and Earthlight), let alone his many short stories. He was equally adept at non-fiction, notably in his The Exploration of Space in the early 1950s, his frequently reprinted Profiles of the Future, and another bunch of books also too numerous to mention. So, instead of not mentioning them further, I’ll just say, go thou and read.
A WALK IN THE DARK
Arthur C. Clarke
Robert Armstrong had walked just over two miles, as far as he could judge, when his torch failed. He stood still for a moment, unable to believe that such a misfortune could really have befallen him. Then, half maddened with rage, he hurled the useless instrument away. It landed somewhere in the darkness, disturbing the silence of this little world. A metallic echo came ringing back from the low hills: then all was quiet again.
This, thought Armstrong, was the ultimate misfortune. Nothing more could happen to him now. He was even able to laugh bitterly at his luck, and resolved never again to imagine that the fickle goddess had ever favored him. Who would have believed that the only tractor at Camp IV would have broken down when he was just setting off for Port Sanderson? He recalled the frenzied repair work, the relief when the second start had been made, and the final debacle when the caterpillar track had jammed.
It was no use then regretting the lateness of his departure: he could not have foreseen these accidents, and it was still a good four hours before the Canopus took off. He had to catch her, whatever happened; no other ship would be touching at this world for another month.
Apart from the urgency of his business, four more weeks on this out-of-the-way planet were unthinkable.
There had been only one thing to do. It was lucky that Port Sanderson was little more than six miles from the camp—not a great distance, even on foot. He had had to leave all his equipment behind, but it could follow on the next ship and he could manage without it. The road was poor, merely stamped out of the rock by one of the Board’s hundred-ton crushers, but there was no fear of going astray.
Even now, he was in no real danger, though he might well be too late to catch the ship. Progress would be slow, for he dare not risk losing the road in this region of canyons and enigmatic tunnels that had never been explored. It was, of course, pitch-dark. Here at the edge of the Galaxy the stars were so few and scattered that their light was negligible. The strange crimson sun of this lonely world would not rise for many hours, and although five of the little moons were in the sky, they could barely be seen by the unaided eye. Not one of them could even cast a shadow.
Armstrong was not the man to bewail his luck for long. He began to walk slowly along the road, feeling its texture with his feet. It was, he knew, fairly straight except where it wound through Carver’s Pass. He wished he had a stick or something to probe the way before him, but he would have to rely for guidance on the feel of the ground.
It was terribly slow at first, until he gained confidence. He had never known how difficult it was to walk in a straight line. Although the feeble stars gave him his bearings, again and again he found himself stumbling among the virgin rocks at the edge of the crude roadway. He was traveling in long zigzags that took him to alternate sides of the road. Then he would stub his toes against the bare rock and grope his way back onto the hard-packed surface once again.
Presently it settled down to a routine. It was impossible to estimate his speed; he could only struggle along and hope for the best. There were four miles to go—four miles and as many hours. It should be easy enough, unless he lost his way. But he dared not think of that.
Once he had mastered the technique he could afford the luxury of thought. He could not pretend that he was enjoying the experience, but he had been in much worse positions before. As long as he remained on the road, he was perfectly safe. He had been hoping that as his eyes became adapted to the starlight he would be able to see the way, but he now knew that the whole journey would be blind. The discovery gave him a vivid sense of his remoteness from the heart of the Galaxy. On a night as clear as this, the skies of almost any other planet would have been blazing with stars. Here at this outpost of the Universe the sky held perhaps a hundred faintly gleaming points of light, as useless as the five ridiculous moons on which no one had ever bothered to land.
A slight change in the road interrupted his thoughts. Was there a curve here, or had he veered off to the right again? He moved very slowly along the invisible and ill-defined border. Yes, there was no mistake: the road was bending to the left. He tried to remember its appearance in the daytime, but he had only seen it once before. Did this mean that he was nearing the Pass? He hoped so, for the journey would then be half-completed.
He peered ahead into the blackness, but the ragged line of the horizon told him nothing. Presently he found that the road had straightened itself again and his spirits sank. The entrance to the Pass must still be some way ahead: there were at least four miles to go.
Four miles—how ridiculous the distance seemed! How long would it take the Canopus to travel four miles? He doubted if man could measure so short an interval of time. And how many trillions of miles had he, Robert Armstrong, traveled in his life? It must have reached a staggering total by now, for in the last twenty years he had scarcely stayed more than a month at a time on any single world. This very year, he had twice made the crossing of the Galaxy, and that was a notable journey even in these days of the phantom drive.
He tripped over a loose stone, and the jolt brought him back to reality. It was no use, here, thinking of ships that could eat up the light-years. He was facing Nature, with no weapons but his own strength and skill.
It was strange that it took him so long to identify the real cause of his uneasiness. The last four weeks had been very full, and the rush of his departure, coupled with the annoyance and anxiety caused by the tractor’s breakdowns, had driven everything else from his mind. Moreover, he had always prided himself on his hardheadedness and lack of imagination. Until now, he had forgotten all about that first evening at the Base, when the crews had regaled him with the usual tall yarns concocted for the benefit of newcomers.
It was then that the old Base clerk had told the story of his walk by night from Port Sanderson to the camp, and of what had trailed him through Carver’s Pass, keeping always beyond the limit of his torchlight. Armstrong, who had heard such tales on a score of worlds, had paid it little attention at the time. This planet, after all, was known to be uninhabited. But logic could not dispose of the matter as easily as that. Suppose, after all, there was some truth in the old man’s fantastic tale. . . ?
It was not a pleasant thought, and Armstrong did not intend to brood upon it. But he knew that if he dismissed it out of hand it would continue to prey on his mind. The only way to conquer imaginary fears was to face them boldly; he would have to do that now.
His strongest argument was the complete barrenness of this world and its utter desolation, though against that one could set many counterarguments, as indeed the old clerk had done. Man had only lived on this planet for twenty years, and much of it was still unexplored. No one could deny that the tunnels out in the wasteland were rather puzzling, but everyone believed them to be volcanic vents. Though, of course, life often crept into such places. With a shudder he remembered the giant polyps that had snared the first explorers of Vargon III.
It was all very inconclusive. Suppose, for the sake of argument, one granted the existence of life here. What of that?
The vast majority of life forms in the Universe were completely indifferent to man. Some, of course, like the gas-beings of Alcoran or the roving wave-lattices of Shandaloon, could not even detect him but passed through or around him as if he did not exist. Others were merely inquisitive, some embarrassingly friendly. There were few indeed that would attack unless provoked.
Nevertheless, it was a grim picture that the old stores clerk had painted. Back in the warm, well-lighted smoking room, with the drinks going around, it had been easy enough to laugh at it. But here in the darkness, miles from any human settlement, it was very different.
It was almost a relief when he stumbled off the road again and had to grope with his hands until he found it once more. This seemed a very rough patch, and the road was scarcely distinguishable from the rocks around. In a few minutes, however, he was safely on his way again.
It was unpleasant to see how quickly his thoughts returned to the same disquieting subject. Clearly it was worrying him more than he cared to admit.
He drew consolation from one fact: it had been quite obvious that no one at the Base had believed the old fellow’s story. Their questions and banter had proved that. At the time, he had laughed as loudly as any of them. After all, what was the evidence? A dim shape, just seen in the darkness, that might well have been an oddly formed rock. And the curious clicking noise that had so impressed the old man—anyone could imagine such sounds at night if they were sufficiently overwrought. If it had been hostile, why hadn’t the creature come any closer? “Because it was afraid of my light,” the old chap had said. Well, that was plausible enough: it would explain why nothing had ever been seen in the daylight. Such a creature might live underground, only emerging at night—damn it, why was he taking the old idiot’s ravings so seriously! Armstrong got control of his thoughts again. If he went on this way, he told himself angrily, he would soon be seeing and hearing a whole menagerie of monsters.
There was, of course, one factor that disposed of the ridiculous story at once. It was really very simple; he felt sorry he hadn’t thought of it before. What would such a creature live on? There was not even a trace of vegetation on the whole of the planet. He laughed to think that the bogey could be disposed of so easily—and in the same instant felt annoyed with himself for not laughing aloud. If he was so sure of his reasoning, why not whistle, or sing, or do anything to keep up his spirits? He put the question fairly to himself as a text of his manhood. Half-ashamed, he had to admit that he was still afraid—afraid because “there might be something in it after all.” But at least his analysis had done him some good.
It would have been better if he had left it there, and remained half-convinced by his argument. But a part of his mind was still trying to break down his careful reasoning. It succeeded only too well, and when he remembered the plant-beings of Zantil Major the shock was so unpleasant that he stopped dead in his tracks.
Now the plant-beings of Xantil were not in any way horrible. They were in fact extremely beautiful creatures. But what made them appear so distressing now was the knowledge that they could live for indefinite periods with no food whatsoever. All the energy they needed for their strange lives they extracted from cosmic radiation—and that was almost as intense here as anywhere else in the universe.
He had scarcely thought of one example before others crowded into his mind and he remembered the life form on Trantor Beta, which was the only one known capable of directly utilizing atomic energy. That too had lived on an utterly barren world, very much like this . . .
Armstrong’s mind was rapidly splitting into two distinct portions, each trying to convince the other and neither wholly succeeding. He did not realize how far his morale had gone until he found himself holding his breath lest it conceal any sound from the darkness about him. Angrily, he cleared his mind of the rubbish that had been gathering there and turned once more to the immediate problem.
There was no doubt that the road was slowly rising, and the silhouette of the horizon seemed much higher in the sky. The road began to twist, and suddenly he was aware of great rocks on either side of him. Soon only a narrow ribbon of sky was still visible, and the darkness became, if possible, even more intense.
Somehow, he felt safer with the rock walls surrounding him: it meant that he was protected except in two directions. Also, the road had been leveled more carefully and it was easy to keep it. Best of all, he knew now that the journey was more than half completed.
For a moment his spirits began to rise. Then, with maddening perversity, his mind went back into the old grooves again. He remembered that it was on the far side of Carver’s Pass that the old clerk’s adventure had taken place—if it had ever happened at all.
In half a mile, he would be out in the open again, out of the protection of these sheltering rocks. The thought seemed doubly horrible now and he already felt a sense of nakedness. He could be attacked from any direction, and he would be utterly helpless . . .
Until now, he had still retained some self-control. Very resolutely he had kept his mind away from the one fact that gave some color to the old man’s tale—the single piece of evidence that had stopped the banter in the crowded room back at the camp and brought a sudden hush upon the company. Now, as Armstrong’s will weakened, he recalled again the words that had struck a momentary chill even in the warm comfort of the base building.
The little clerk had been very insistent on one point. He had never heard any sound of pursuit from the dim shape sensed, rather than seen, at the limit of his light. There was no scuffling of claws or hoofs on rock, not even the clatter of displaced stones. It was as if, so the old man had declared in that solemn manner of his, “as if the thing that was following could see perfectly in the darkness, and had many small legs or pads so that it could move swiftly and easily over the rock—like a giant caterpillar or one of the carpet-things of Kralkor II.”
Yet, although there had been no noise of pursuit, there had been one sound that the old man had caught several times. It was so unusual that its very strangeness made it doubly ominous. It was a faint but horribly persistent clicking.
The old fellow had been able to describe it very vividly—much too vividly for Armstrong’s liking now.
“Have you ever listened to a large insect crunching its prey?” he said. “Well, it was just like that. I imagine that a crab makes exactly the same noise with its claws when it clashes them together. It was a—what’s the word?—a chitinous sound.”
At this point, Armstrong remembered laughing loudly. (Strange, how it was all coming back to him now.) But no one else had laughed, though they had been quick to do so earlier. Sensing the change of tone, he had sobered at once and asked the old man to continue his story. How he wished now that he had stifled his curiosity!
It had been quickly told. The next day, a party of skeptical technicians had gone into the no-man’s land beyond Carver’s Pass. They were not skeptical enough to leave their guns behind, but they had no cause to use them for they found no trace of any living thing. There were the inevitable pits and tunnels, glistening holes down which the light of the torches rebounded endlessly until it was lost in the distance—but the planet was riddled with them.
Though the party found no sign of life, it discovered one thing it did not like at all. Out in the barren and unexplored land beyond the Pass they had come upon an even larger tunnel than the rest. Near the mouth of that tunnel was a massive rock, half embedded in the ground. And the sides of that rock had been worn away as if it had been used as an enormous whetstone.
No less than five of those present had seen this disturbing rock. None of them could explain it satisfactorily as a natural formation, but they still refused to accept the old man’s story. Armstrong had asked them if they had ever put it to the test. There had been an uncomfortable silence. Then big Andrew Hargraves had said: “Hell, who’d walk out to the Pass at night just for fun!” and had left it at that. Indeed, there was no other record of anyone walking from Port Sanderson to the camp by night, or for that matter by day. During the hours of light, no unprotected human being could live in the open beneath the rays of the enormous, lurid sun that seemed to fill half the sky. And no one would walk six miles, wearing radiation armor, if the tractor was available.
Armstrong felt he was leaving the Pass. The rocks on either side were falling away, and the road was no longer as firm and well packed as it had been. He was coming out into the open plain once more, and somewhere not far away in the darkness was that enigmatic pillar that might have been used for sharpening monstrous fangs or claws. It was not a reassuring thought, but he could not get it out of his mind.
Feeling distinctly worried now, Armstrong made great effort to pull himself together. He would try to be rational again; he would think of business, the work he had done at the camp—anything but this infernal place. For a while he succeeded quite well. But presently, with a maddening persistence, every train of thought came back to the same point. He could not get out of his mind the picture of that inexplicable rock and its appalling possibilities. Over and over again he found himself wondering how far away it was, whether he had already passed it, and whether it was on his right or his left.
The ground was quite flat again, and the road drove on straight as an arrow. There was one gleam of consolation: Port Sanderson could not be much more than two miles away. Armstrong had no idea how long he had been on the road. Unfortunately his watch was not illuminated and he could only guess at the passage of time. With any luck, the Canopus should not take off for another two hours at least. But he could not be sure, and now another fear began to enter his mind—the dread that he might see a vast constellation of lights rising swiftly into the sky ahead, and know that all this agony of mind had been in vain.
He was not zigzagging so badly now, and seemed to be able to anticipate the edge of the road before stumbling off it. It was probable, he cheered himself by thinking, that he was traveling almost as fast as if he had a light. If all went well, he might be nearing Port Sanderson in thirty minutes—a ridiculously small space of time. How he would laugh at his fears when he strolled into his already reserved stateroom in the “Canopus,” and felt that peculiar quiver as the phantom drive hurled the great ship far out of this system, back to the clustered star-clouds near the center of the Galaxy—back toward Earth itself, which he had not seen for so many years. One day, he told himself, he really must visit Earth again. All his life he had been making the promise, but always there had been the same answer—lack of time. Strange, wasn’t it, that such a tiny planet should have played so enormous a part in the development of the Universe, should even have come to dominate worlds far wiser and more intelligent than itself!
Armstrong’s thoughts were harmless again, and he felt calmer. The knowledge that he was nearing Port Sanderson was immensely reassuring, and he deliberately kept his mind on familiar, unimportant matters. Carver’s Pass was already far behind, and with it that thing he no longer intended to recall. One day, if he ever returned to this world, he would visit the pass in the daytime and laugh at his fears. In twenty minutes now, they would have joined the nightmares of his childhood.
It was almost a shock, though one of the most pleasant he had ever known, when he saw the lights of Port Sanderson come up over the horizon. The curvature of this little world was very deceptive: it did not seem right that a planet with a gravity almost as great as Earth’s should have a horizon so close at hand. One day, someone would have to discover what lay at this world’s core to give it so great a density. Perhaps the many tunnels would help—it was an unfortunate turn of thought, but the nearness of his goal had robbed it of terror now. Indeed, the thought that he might really be in danger seemed to give his adventure a certain piquancy and heightened interest. Nothing could happen to hims now, with ten minutes to go and the lights of the Port already in sight.
A few minutes later, his feelings changed abruptly when he came to the sudden bend in the road. He had forgotten the chasm that caused his detour, and added half a mile to the journey. Well, what of it? He thought stubbornly. An extra half-mile would make no difference now—another ten minutes, at the most.
It was very disappointing when the lights of the city vanished. Armstrong had not remembered the hill which the road was skirting, perhaps it was only a low ridge, scarcely noticeable in the daytime. But by hiding the lights of the port it had taken away his chief talisman and left him again at the mercy of his fears.
Very unreasonably, his intelligence told him, he began to think how horrible it would be if anything happened now, so near the end of the journey. He kept the worst of his fears at bay for a while, hoping desperately that the lights of the city would soon reappear. But as the minutes dragged on, he realized that the ridge must be longer than he imagined. He tried to cheer himself by the thought that the city would be all the nearer when he saw it again, but somehow logic seemed to have failed him now. For presently he found himself doing something he had not stooped to, even out in the waste by Carver’s Pass.
He stopped, turned slowly round, and with bated breath listened until his lungs were nearly bursting.
The silence was uncanny, considering how near he must be to the Port. There was certainly no sound from behind him. Of course there wouldn’t be, he told himself angrily. But he was immensely relieved. The thought of that faint and insistent clicking had been haunting him for the last hour.
So friendly and familiar was the noise that did reach him at last that the anticlimax almost made him laugh aloud. Drifting through the still air from a source clearly not more than a mile away came the sound of a landing-field tractor, perhaps one of the machines loading the Canopus itself. In a matter of seconds, thought Armstrong, he would be around this ridge with the Port only a few hundred yards ahead. The journey was nearly ended. In a few moments, this evil plain would be no more than a fading nightmare.
It seemed terribly unfair: so little time, such a small fraction of a human life, was all he needed now. But the gods have always been unfair to man, and now there were enjoying their little jest. For there could be no mistaking the rattle of monstrous claws in the darkness aheadof him.
He put the gun back into the bureau drawer and shut the drawer.
No, not that way.
Louise wouldn’t suffer.
It was very important that this thing have, above all duration. Duration through imagination.
How to prolong the suffering?
How, first of all, to bring it about?
Well. The man standing before the bedroom mirror carefully fitted his cuff-links together.
He paused long enough to hear the children run by swiftly on the street below, outside this warm two-storey house, like so many grey mice the children, like so many leaves.
By the sound of the children you knew the calendar day.
By their screams you knew what evening it was.
You knew it was very late in the year.
October.
The last day of October, with white bone masks and cut pumpkins and the smell of dropped candle wax.
No.
Things hadn’t been right for some time.
October didn’t help any.
If anything it made things worse.
He adjusted his black bow-tie.
If this were spring, he nodded slowly, quietly, emotionlessly, at his image in the mirror, then there might be a chance.
But tonight all the world was burning down into ruin.
There was no green spring, none of the freshness, none of the promise.
There was a soft running in the hall.
“That’s Marion”, he told himself. “My little one”.
All eight quiet years of her.
Never a word. Just her luminous grey eyes and her wondering little mouth.
His daughter had been in and out all evening, trying on various masks, asking him which was most terrifying, most horrible. They had both finally decided on the skeleton mask.
It was “just awful!” It would “scare the beans” from people!
Again he caught the long look of thought and deliberation he gave himself in the mirror.
He had never liked October.
Ever since he first lay in the autumn leaves before his grandmother’s house many years ago and heard the wind and sway the empty trees.
It has made him cry, without a reason.
And a little of that sadness returned each year to him.
It always went away with spring.
But, it was different tonight.
There was a feeling of autumn coming to last a million years.
There would be no spring.
He had been crying quietly all evening.
It did not show, not a vestige of it, on his face.
It was all hidden somewhere and it wouldn’t stop.
A rich syrupy smell of sweets filled the bustling house.
Louise had laid out apples in new skins of toffee; there were vast bowls of punch fresh-mixed, stringed apples in each door, scooped, vented pumpkins peering triangularly from each cold window.
There was a water tub in the centre of the living room, waiting, with a sack of apples nearby, for dunking to begin.
All that was needed was the catalyst, the inpouring of children, to start the apples bobbing, the stringed apples to penduluming in the crowded doors, the sweets to vanish, the halls to echo with fright or delight, it was all the same.
Now, the house was silent with preparation.
And just a little more than that.
Louise had managed to be in every other room save the room he was in today.
It was her very fine way of intimating, Oh look Mich, see how busy I am! So busy that when you walk into a room I’m in there’s always something I need to do in another room!
Just see how I dash about!
For a while he had played a little game with her, a nasty childish game.
When she was in the kitchen then he came to the kitchen saying, “I need a glass of water.”
After a moment, he standing, drinking water, she like a crystal witch over the caramel brew bubbling like a prehistoric mudpot on the stove, she said, “Oh, I must light the pumpkins!” and she rushed to the living room to make the pumpkins smile with light.
He came after, smiling, “I must get my pipe.”
“Oh, the cider!” she had cried, running to the dining room.
“I’ll check the cider,” he had said.
But when he tried following she ran to the bathroom and locked the door.
He stood outside the bathroom door, laughing strangely and senselessly, his pipe gone cold in his mouth, and then, tired of the game, but stubborn, he waited another five minutes.
There was not a sound from the bath.
And lest she enjoy in any way knowing that he waited outside, irritated, he suddenly jerked about and walked upstairs, whistling merrily.
At the top of the stairs he had waited.
Finally he had heard the bathroom door unlatch and she had come out and life below-stairs and resumed, as life in a jungle must resume once a terror has passed on away and the antelope return to their spring.
Now, as he finished his bow-tie and put his dark coat there was a mouserustle in the hall.
Marion appeared in the door, all skeletons in her disguise. “How do I look, Papa?”
“Fine!”
From under the mask, blonde hair showed.
From the skull sockets small blue eyes smiled.
He sighed.
Marion and Louise, the two silent denouncers of his virility, his dark power.
alchemy had there been in Louise that took the dark of a dark man and bleached the dark brown eyes and black hair and washed and bleached the ingrown baby all during the period before birth until the child was born, Marion, blonde, blue-eyed, ruddy-cheeked?
Sometimes he suspected that Louise had conceived the child as an idea, completely asexual, an immaculate conception of contemptuous mind and cell.
As a firm rebuke to him she had produced a child in her own image, and, to top it, she had somehow fixed the doctor so he shook his head and said, “Sorry, Mr. Wilder, your wife will never have another child.
This is the last one.” “And I wanted a boy,” Mich had said eight years ago.
He almost bent to take hold of Marion now, in her skull mask.
He felt an inexplicable rush of pity for her, because she had never had a father’s love, only the crushing, holding love of a loveless mother.
But most of all he pitied himself, that somehow he had not made the most of a bad birth, enjoyed his daughter for herself, regardless of her not being dark and a son and like himself.
Somewhere he had missed out.
Other things being equal, he would have loved the child.
But Louise hadn’t wanted a child, anyway, in the first place.
She had been frightened of the idea of birth.
He had forced the child on her, and from that night, all through the year until the agony of the birth itself, Louise had lived in another part of the house.
She had expected to die with the forced child.
It had been very easy for Louise to hate this husband who so wanted a son that he gave his only wife over to the mortuary. But — Louise had lived.
And in triumph!
Her eyes, the day he came to the hospital, were cold. I’m alive they said.
And I have a blonde daughter! Just look!
And when he had put out a hand to touch, the mother had turned away to conspire with her new pink daughter-child — away from that dark forcing murderer.
It had all been so beautifully ironic.
His selfishness deserved it. But now it was October again.
There had been other Octobers and when he thought of the long winter he had been filled with horror year after year to think of the endless months mortared into the house by an insane fall of snow, trapped with a woman and child, neither of whom loved him, for months on end.
During the eight years there had been respites.
In spring and summer you got out, walked, picnicked; these were desperate solutions to the desperate problem of a hated man.
But, in winter, the hikes and picnics and escapes fell away with leaves.
Life, like a tree, stood empty, the fruit picked, the sap run to earth.
Yes, you invited people in, but people were hard to get in winter with blizzards and all.
Once he had been clever enough to save for a Florida trip.
They had gone south.
He had walked in the open.
But now, the eighth winter coming, he knew things were finally at an end.
He simply could not wear this one through.
There was an acid walled off in him that slowly had eaten through tissue and bone over the years, and now, tonight, it would reach the wild explosive in him and all would be over!
There was a mad ringing of the bell below.
In the hall, Louise went to see. Marion, without a word, ran down to greet the first arrivals.
There were shouts and hilarity.
He walked to the top of the stairs.
Louise was below, taking wraps.
She was tall and slender and blonde to the point of whiteness, laughing down upon the new children.
He hesitated. What was all this? The years? The boredom of living? Where had it gone wrong?
Certainly not with the birth of the child alone.
But it had been a symbol of all their tensions, he imagined. His jealousies and his business failures and all the rotten rest of it.
Why didn’t he just turn, pack a suitcase, and leave? No. Not without hurting Louise as much as she had hurt him.
It was simple as that.
Divorce wouldn’t hurt her at all. It would simply be an end to numb indecision. If he thought divorce would give her pleasure in any way he would stay married the rest of his life to her, for damned spite.
No he must hurt her. F
igure some way, perhaps, to take Marion away from her, legally. Yes. That was it. That would hurt most of all.
To take Marion away. “Hello down there!”
He descended the stairs beaming. Louise didn’t look up. “Hi, Mr Wilder!” The children shouted, waved, as he came down.
By ten o’clock the doorbell had stopped ringing, the apples were bitten from stringed doors, the pink faces were wiped dry from the apple bobbling, napkins were smeared with toffee and punch, and he, the husband, with pleasant efficiency had taken over.
He took the party right out of Louise’s hands.
He ran about talking to the twenty children and the twelve parents who had come and were happy with the special spiked cider he had fixed them.
He supervised pin the tail on the donkey, spin the bottle, musical chairs, and all the rest, amid fits of shouting laughter.
Then, in the triangular-eyed pumpkin shine, all house lights out, he cried, “Hush! Follow me!” tiptoeing towards the cellar.
The parents, on the outer periphery of the costumed riot, commented to each other, nodding at the clever husband, speaking to the lucky wife.
How well he got on with children, they said. The children, crowded after the husband, squealing.
“The cellar!” he cried. “The tomb of the witch!”
More squealing. He made a mock shiver. “Abandon hope all ye who enter here!”
The parents chuckled.
One by one the children slid down a slide which Mich had fixed up from lengths of table-section, into the dark cellar. He hissed and shouted ghastly utterances after them. A wonderful wailing filled dark pumpkin-lighted house. Everybody talked at once. Everybody but Marion.
She had gone through all the party with a minimum of sound or talk; it was all inside her, all the excitement and joy.
What a little troll, he thought.
With a shut mouth and shiny eyes she had watched her own party, like so many serpentines thrown before her. Now, the parents.
With laughing reluctance they slid down the short incline, uproarious, while little Marion stood by, always wanting to see it all, to be last.
Louise went down without help. He moved to aid her, but she was gone even before he bent. The upper house was empty and silent in the candle-shine. Marion stood by the slide.
“Here we go,” he said, and picked her up. They sat in a vast circle in the cellar. Warmth came from the distant bulk of the furnace.
The chairs stood in a long line along each wall, twenty squealing children, twelve rustling relatives, alternatively spaced, with Louise down at the far end, Mich up at this end, near the stairs.
He peered but saw nothing. They had all grouped to their chairs, catch-as-you-can in the blackness. The entire programme from here on was to be enacted in the dark, he as Mr. Interlocutor.
There was a child scampering, a smell of damp cement, and the sound of the wind out in the October stars. “Now!” cried the husband in the dark cellar.
“Quiet!” Everybody settled. The room was black black.
Not a light, not a shine, not a glint of an eye. A scraping of crockery, a metal rattle. “The witch is dead,” intoned the husband. “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee,” said the children.
“The witch is dead, she has been killed, and here is the knife she was killed with.”
He handed over the knife. It was passed from hand to hand, down and around the circle, with chuckles and little odd cries and comments from the adults.
“The witch is dead, and this is her head,” whispered the husband, and handed an item to the nearest person.
“Oh, I know how this game is played,” some child cried, happily, in the dark. “He gets some old chicken innards from the icebox and hands them around and says, ‘These are her innards!’
And he makes a clay head and passes it for her head, and passes a soup bone for her arm. And he takes a marble and says, ‘This is her eye!’ And he takes some corn and says, ‘This is her teeth!’ And he takes a sack of plum pudding and gives that and says, ‘This is her stomach!’ I know how this is played!” “Hush, you’ll spoil everything,” some girl said. “The witch came to harm, and this is her arm,” said Mich. “Eeeeeeeeeeee!”
The items were passed and passed, like hot potatoes, around the cirle. Some children screamed, wouldn’t touch them.
Some ran from their chairs to stand in the centre of the cellar until the grisly items had passed.
“Aw, it’s only chicken insides,” scoffed a boy. “Come back, Helen!” Shot from hand to hand, with small scream after scream, the items went down, down, to be followed by another and another.
“The witch cut apart, and this is her heart,” said the husband.
Six or seven items moving at once through the laughing, trembling dark. Louise spoke up. “Marion, don’t be afraid; it’s only play.”
Marion didn’t say anything. “Marion?” asked Louise. “Are you afraid?” Marion didn’t speak. “She’s all right,” said the husband.
“She’s not afraid.”
On and on the passing, the screams, the hilarity. The autumn wind sighed about the house. And he, the husband stood at the head of the dark cellar, intoning the words, handing out the items. “Marion?” asked Louise again, from far across the cellar.
Everybody was talking. “Marion?” called Louise.
Everybody quieted. “Marion, answer me, are you afraid?”
Marion didn’t answer.
The husband stood there, at the bottom of the cellar steps.
Louise called “Marion, are you there?”
No answer.
The room was silent.
“Where’s Marion?” called Louise.
“She was here”, said a boy. “Maybe she’s upstairs.”
“Marion!”
No answer.
It was quiet.
Louise cried out, “Marion, Marion!”
“Turn on the lights,” said one of the adults.
The items stopped passing.
The children and adults sat with the witch’s items in their hands.
“No.” Louise gasped.
There was a scraping of her chair, wildly, in the dark.
“No. Don’t turn on the lights, oh, God, God, God, don’t turn them on, please, don’t turn on the lights, don’t!”
Louise was shrieking now.
The entire cellar froze with the scream.
Nobody moved.
Everyone sat in the dark cellar, suspended in the suddenly frozen task of this October game; the wind blew outside, banging the house, the smell of pumpkins and apples filled the room with the smell of the objects in their fingers while one boy cried, “I’ll go upstairs and look!” and he ran upstairs hopefully and out around the house, four times around the house, calling, “Marion, Marion, Marion!” over and over and at last coming slowly down the stairs into the waiting breathing cellar and saying to the darkness, “I can’t find her.”
Now, I don’t want ANYONE bitching and moaning that I am presenting art for scuzy-ball males to drool over. Ok? Art is something that I love, and while my tastes in art are out of the mainstream, it is not a reflection of my thoughts, but rather of my emotions.
How not to love a good set of heartwarming illustrations?
Pascal Campion comes up with artworks that some of us will relate to. Like that time in your childhood when you would hangout with your buddies and explore the neighborhood… or that time when it was really snowy/rainy when you would sit by the window and think about life.
That’s the beauty of Pascal’s work… it’s really relatable, and it brings a sense of saudade (in portuguese, it’s a sense of missing things that might have happened or not, a kind of nostalgia). These are some fine examples of art with a sentiment.
Meanwhile, by every single fact we are able to observe, the decadent leaders of the West are acting as though Russia and China are Iraq and Libya.
It appears that they genuinely believe they can use brute force and threats of brute force to come out on top in this conflict.
(It’s also worth mentioning that the West, due to the ultra-low moral character of its leaders and the utter lack of any unifying ideal beyond anal sex, has lost the ability to cooperate cohesively as a single body in the way that the Chinese do.)
-UNZ
What do all these things have in common? They all are attributes of a period of time that is going though change. Some people might refer to it as an unravelling, while others might consider it the “second coming”. I think that it’s darn uncomfortable, and bothersome. It’s a period of change and it is nearing it’s peak.
Sheech!
I need a drink.
What? I’m already drinking. Oh, well. Color me silly.
This article has a bunch of videos. Most are small, but depending on your internet connection, they may or may not load. Just click on the link and watch them open up in another window. Most are really quick.
Strange stuff guys…
Strange and unusual things going on.
In China, a passenger aircraft took a highly unusual nose dive. Engines went full throttle, and the plane dove straight into the ground. It’s almost like the plane decided to commit suicide by ramming itself into the ground at full speed.
It’s not normal airplane behavior.
Don’t you know.
The unusual nature of this crash has everyone scratching their heads, and MM is no exception. Since this is Boeing plane that openly admits that the plane’s computer can override the pilot and fly itself…
So, and I do mean it … the software can take the input, decide the pilot is in error, and take over…
… so why have a pilot then?
Hum?
…
It is very concerning.
The opinions sent to me privately are running near 100% that the United States government / CIA are somehow involved in this fiasco. I would not be surprised if this is the case, but the truth is that I really do not know.
But…
You do know that we are going to flush out this issue.
Right here.
Right now.
MM style.
What I do know is that this entire event has shaken the Chinese people to the core. No one. And I do mean NO ONE wants to fly. Airline prices are now less than $5 USD to fly round-trip to Beijing from Zhuahi. It’s insane.
Just like the crash of the Hindenburg completely ended commercial travel by dirigible, it seems that this even will seriously impact commercial aviation inside of China. There will be far greater use of the High Speed Trains, and far less use of domestic air transport.
In 1936, the future looked bright for rigid airships, the hydrogen-filled, lighter-than-air behemoths also known as dirigibles or zeppelins.
The Hindenburg, Nazi Germany’s pride and joy, spent one glorious season ferrying passengers across the Atlantic in its luxurious belly. The following year, the airship era screeched to a spectacular halt when the Hindenburg burst into flames while landing in Lakehurst, New Jersey. The disaster claimed the lives of 36 people and received an unprecedented amount of media coverage.
The Hindenburg was a 245-metre- (804-foot-) long airship of conventional zeppelin design that was launched at Friedrichshafen, Germany, in March 1936. It had a maximum speed of 135 km (84 miles) per hour and a cruising speed of 126 km (78 miles) per hour. Though it was designed to be filled with helium gas, the airship was filled with highly flammable hydrogen owing to export restrictions by the United States against Nazi Germany. In 1936 the Hindenburg inaugurated commercial air service across the North Atlantic by carrying 1,002 passengers on 10 scheduled round trips between Germany and the United States.
On May 6, 1937, while landing at Lakehurst, N.J., on the first of its scheduled 1937 trans-Atlantic crossings, the Hindenburg burst into flames and was completely destroyed. Thirty-six of the 97 persons aboard were killed.
The fire was officially attributed to a discharge of atmospheric electricity in the vicinity of a hydrogen gas leak from the airship, though it was speculated that the dirigible was the victim of an anti-Nazi act of sabotage.
The Hindenburg disaster marked the end of the use of rigid airships in commercial air transportation.
Forever.
Grasshopper Pie
A staple among southern desserts in the 1950s and 1960s, this creamy mint pie sports an Oreo crust, all of which makes it strange that it hasn’t remained as popular as it once was.
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This American retro dessert was inspired by the popular 1950’s chocolate-mint cocktail, and it was a favorite of Southern hostesses in the 1950s and 1960s. Originally, grasshopper pie always had a crust of either cookies or graham cracker crumbs, but today it is most often made with a base of Oreos, desiccated coconut, and butter, while the gelatine-set cream filling mainly consists of heavy cream flavored with crème de menthe—a sweet, mint-flavored liqueur—and melted marshmallows.
Grasshopper pie is usually so named because of its green color, though modern recipes may omit coloring the pie green. It was likely invented in the 1950s in the United States, and may have been inspired by a drink called the grasshopper developed at about the same time. It is a chiffon pie usually made with a cookie crust.
There is an earlier grasshopper pie type dating back to the beginning of the 20th century. Some versions of this pie from the Philippines used real grasshoppers. These insects are eaten in many cultures, and they can be used in various desserts, where they may be sugared and baked, providing a crunchy, and to some very appetizing, confection. The 1950s grasshopper pie bears little resemblance to versions produced that have insects as a primary ingredient.
Chiffon pies in the 1950s were often a combination of whipping cream, gelatin, sugar, eggs, and flavoring. In the case of the grasshopper pie, common flavoring used was alcohol in the form of crème de menthe, and sometimes other alcohols like crème de cacao.
For teetotalers, mint flavoring could be achieved by using mint extracts instead, though these might still contain a tiny amount of alcohol. Green food coloring was a frequent addition to give the pie a light green color.
Most often the cookie crust is made with chocolate wafers, so that the pie has a chocolate and mint flavor. The crust is baked for few moments and then chilled. When the chiffon is prepared, usually over a double boiler, it is chilled and then spooned over the crust. The pie tends to be served cold and many love its refreshing mint taste.
There may be very large differences between classic recipes for grasshopper pie and modern ones. Since gelatin can be somewhat annoying to work with, many people now prepare the pie by melting marshmallows and blending them with milk or whipping cream, and sometimes cream cheese. Green food coloring can be optional, and when not used the pie could be called “mint patty pie” instead. Some people may prefer using a graham cracker crust, and other recipes advocate the use of specific cookies like Oreos®.
In the US, grasshopper pie tends to be most popular in the South, but other parts of the country enjoy it too. The pie rose in popularity especially up until the 1970s, but it is now served with less frequency. Many ice cream stores capitalized on the flavor of this pie by producing their own version with mint or mint chocolate chip ice cream and a cookie crust. Some ice cream stores are particularly known for their grasshopper pie variants.
-Delighted Cooking
The pie is traditionally served well chilled, topped with dollops of whipped cream, and decorated with dark chocolate shavings.
In American terms, we would refer to this “body shape
or “Body build” as “built like a Brick House”. It’s generally a nice compliment for a fine robust woman. In this case, a Chinese woman. video. 5MB
Th Saker has reproduced the transcript of a talk Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergej Lavrov has given three days ago. It is quite long with a Q&A at the end but it is a very good history lesson on how we got to the point that Russia felt it had to intervene in the Ukraine.
Here are just a few graphs of it. I recommend to read it all of it:
This meeting takes place against the backdrop of events now occurring in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly spoken at length about the origins of this crisis. I would like to briefly reiterate: this is not about Ukraine. This is the end-result of a policy that the West has carried out since the early 1990s. It was clear back then that Russia was not going to be docile and that it was going to have a say in international matters. This is not because Russia wants to be a bully. Russia has its history, its tradition, its own understanding of the history of its peoples and a vision on how it can ensure its security and interests in this world.This became clear in the late 1990s-early 2000s. The West has repeatedly attempted to stall the independent and autonomous development of Russia. This is rather unfortunate. From the start of President Vladimir Putin’s “rule” in the early 2000s, we were open to the idea of working with the West in various ways, even in a form similar to that of an alliance, as the President has said. Sadly, we were unable to do this. We repeatedly suggested that we should conclude treaties and base our security on equal rights, rejecting the idea of strengthening one’s security at the expense of another.Neither were we able to promote economic cooperation. The European Union, which back then showed some signs of independent decision-making, has now devolved toward being completely dependent on the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the US. The story of Nord Stream 2 was the highlight of this change. Even Germany, which defended its interests in the project to the very end, was persuaded that the “project was not in its interests.” Germany and its people were told what their interests were by people on the other side of the Atlantic. Many other international areas were blocked despite our commitment to close cooperation on an equal basis.
Germany’s traitorous role towards Russia, especially under chancellor Angela Merkel, is laid out throughout the piece. The current chancellor Olaf Scholz, never a smart man, capitulated to U.S. demands to sanction Russia and thereby committed Germany to economic suicide.
That spells death for Germany’s machine industry. It is said to see my country come down like this.
Hey Olaf, when the U.S. illegally invaded Iraq for absolutely no good reason how many sanctions did Germany apply to it?
Russia has at least cited sound and understandable, if not fully legal, reasons for its current acts. It was by the way you, Olaf, and your predecessor who have let it come to this. Why didn’t you write a letter to Putin that declared that Germany will veto NATO membership for the Ukraine. That might have solved the whole problem.
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There is some talk that Russia has screwed up its campaign and some even hope that it might be losing the war. That’s nuts.
Back when I was a military officer we ran yearly large scale ‘free running’ maneuvers. Over nearly four weeks my tank company had to switch positions several times a day and march and ‘fight’ in between. The first week was cumbersome with lots of errors made by everyone. The second week was worse. Everyone was sleep deprived and folks screamed at each other. We had several accidents and twice parts of the company missed turns and got lost at night. During the third week things became gradually better and more routine. The drivers knew where to put their tanks without much command. The camouflaging done by the loaders and gunners was fast. The food that found its way to us was still hot and maintenance was done in no time. In the fourth week it was all pure fun.
The reason behind it was that people needed to learn by doing. Before the maneuvers everyone had been ‘fully trained’. But a few days on the training range do not give the experience one needs in the real world. Driving and ‘fighting’ through real villages and cities, real camouflaging against an ‘enemy’ airforce, real dueling in the open landscape day after day are different than training range time.
Russia’s forces are now in their routine mode. They will now grind down what is left of the Ukrainian forces.
According to the Pentagon the Russian airforce yesterday flew 300 sorties over Ukraine, mostly at night. That are 50% more per day than last week. That means 300 Ukrainian weapon factories, ammunition depots, convoys and fighting position get destroyed every day, day after day. How long will it take until there are no more targets?
Andrew Milburn, a former Marine colonel, is in the Ukraine from where he reports for Task and Purpose:
The Russians are already adapting, and by doing so are narrowing the Ukrainians’ tactical edge. The one-sided culling of Russian armored columns that characterized the opening days of the war, and kept YouTube subscribers around the world happy, are a thing of the past. The Russians now lead their formations with electronic attack, drones, lasers and good-old-fashioned reconnaissance by fire. They are using cruise missiles and saboteur teams to target logistics routes, manufacturing plants, and training bases in western Ukraine. Realizing that the Ukrainians lack thermal sights for their stinger missile launchers, the Russians have switched all air operations to after dark. It may be for this same reason that Russian cruise missile strikes in western and southern Ukraine have also been at nighttime.The Russians have learned to play to their strengths. While Ukrainian soldiers mock their Russian counterparts, they are deeply respectful of Russian artillery, an asset that the Russians are using more frequently to compensate for their infantry’s deficiencies. Several snipers I spoke with recently agreed that the Russians’ indirect fire capability was the most concerning — a result of sheer reckless mass rather than technical skill. They told some hair-raising stories to illustrate their point, and one amusing one: Ukrainian soldiers defending Kyiv commute to the battle in their own vehicles. After a recent three-day insertion, the sniper teams returned to their extraction site to find their cars all flattened by Russian artillery – a contingency apparently not covered by their insurance plans.Overconfidence may obscure for the Ukrainians one salient fact about this conflict: Time is not on their side.
Posted by b on March 22, 2022 at 17:55 UTC | Permalink
Hilarious Prank Gift Packages To Surprise Your Friends This Christmas
How will you wrap your Christmas presents this year? Will you buy some expensive wrapping paper and then silently weep in the corner when you realize you have no idea what you’re doing? Or just give up entirely and pay someone else to do it? Lucky for you, one company out there is aiming to make gift wrapping a little more fun.
Pranko-O is a Minneapolis-based company that creates hilarious prank gifts, called Prank Packs. A fart filter or an earwax candle might sound insane at first but don’t worry – that’s where the ‘prank’ part of Prank Pack comes in. The products, sadly, don’t exist and are just gag boxes. But imagine your partner’s reaction when they were hoping to get a Pandora necklace for Christmas but receive a cheese printer instead – priceless!
Here’s a few for some inspiration. This is a Cheese printer. Surprise your friends!
Here’s another. It’s a “must” for every pet owner.
And yet another. Fun for kids of all ages!
Confirmed: Nazis are the proxy army of the US imperialists against Russia in Ukraine
The former US secretary of defense and CIA director, Leon Panetta, admitted openly that
“We are engaged in a conflict here. It's a proxy war with Russia, whether we say so or not ...”.
Referring to the Ukrainian forces, the US imperialist warhawk claimed that
"These are good fighters, they are small-unit operations, they are working well ...".
The description “small-unit operations” fits to proxy forces – mercenaries, rather than an organized national army.
As we mentioned in our previous article, for eight years, the NATO criminals and the “free” and “democratic” West, were provoking Russia by arming and training the far-right and neo-nazi militia groups who also infiltrated in the Ukrainian army and operate in East Ukraine against Russian populations. Which is something similar with what happened in the long-suffering Syria by the US proxy war against Assad. Only there, the US imperialists armed and trained some so-called “moderate rebels”, with most of the arms ending in the hands of ISIS islamofascists who spread chaos and destruction.
Panetta’s statements are essentially an official admission by the US side that this is the case.
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This also explains why the Russians are so obsessed with Mariupol, which appears that it suffered most from the war in Ukraine so far. It seems that they won’t retreat from their demand to Ukraine to surrender the besieged city. Not only because of its critical strategic importance, but mostly because it’s the base of the Azov Battalion, which is essentially the major US proxy Nazi force in the Ukrainian soil.
In March 2015 Interior Minister Arsen Avakov announced that the Azov Regiment would be among the first units to be trained by United States Army troops in their Operation Fearless Guardian training mission.
US training however was withdrawn on 12 June 2015, as the US House of Representatives passed an amendment blocking any aid (including arms and training) to the battalion due to its neo-Nazi background.
However, the amendment was later removed in November 2015, with The Nation reporting that the "House Defense Appropriations Committee came under pressure from the Pentagon to remove the Conyers-Yoho amendment from the text of the bill."Azov published a media release on its website on 20 November 2017 stating that it had met with a foreign delegation of officers from the United States Armed Forces and Canadian Armed Forces on 16 November.
Writing for Jacobin, Branko Marcetic says that members of Azov have been pictured meeting with U.S. military and NATO officials.
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This is a particularly revealing information because it proves beyond doubt that the US imperialist apparatus was very well aware of the nazi nature of the Azov Battalion. And did everything to overcome any political actions that were aiming to block any aid to its members.
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Recall that new information – coming from the elite section of the US think tank apparatus – proved that the US imperialists wanted to drag Russia into a war with Ukraine since at least 2019.
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Everything we wrote back in 2014 turns out to be right:
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What was left to do, for the moment, is to challenge Putin in order to drag Russia in an endless attrition war in East Ukraine and this explains to a degree Putin's hesitation to act like he did in Crimea. Against Russian army, of course, the West will not risk to put an organized military force, but only teams of mercenaries of private armies, as already did. It is certain, however, that, despite that the global economic oligarchy has lost valuable time because of its wrong moves, it will not give up its plans for Russia easily ...
Mapping proxy wars of the last decades around the globe we also wrote back in 2015 that the Ukraine conflict is a proxy war against Russia by the West, next to the Russian borders. Behind the color revolutions, one can always find US financed organizations. The Western allies would not dare to face directly the Russian army. In the Ukraine conflict one could find private armies of mercenaries. The most stupid action by the Western puppets was to support neo-nazis against the local Russian populations. This was something that exposed their real intention, which is to encircle Russia through puppet regimes who would permit the Western military presence in their territories.
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By aiding the nazis in Ukraine, the US and the West generally, lost their last remnants of their alleged “superiority” on matters related with democracy, human rights, or, international law. West’s moral bankruptcy and cultural decline are now irreversible and mark the beginning of the end of its global domination.
In China, red is considered a lucky and happy color. I like this woman in this outfit. She is pleasing to the eye and I am sure that she would be fun to be with. video 2MB
Strange coincidences
I offer up this following graph. It shows an association between belief in the mainstream media (the United States government narrative) and number of mRNA injections.
The more mRNA injections you have, the more that you believe whatever the MSM (Main Stream Media) says.
Look over the results.
It is errie.
It could be a coincidence. It might be. But, you know, there are secrets, and secrets, and the United States is run by very selfish, sick, evil people. Something is up. But what?
What is going on?
I don’t know…
It reminds me of the old 1950s movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Imagine that you and everyone else are normal. You go to work, and you play. You go drive your car, and listen to the radio.
There’s a pandemic. Everyone must get these “special” injections.
Not a vaccine, mind you. But something “new” and “special”. And so you plan on getting one, but your entire community beats you to it. Everyone is injected with the “special” formulation but you, and so when you finally go into town to get your injection, you notice something different.
Everything is the same.
Yet everything is different.
You have a difficult time trying to describe what is do different. They all look the same. They act the same. They all have absolute perfect memories. But something is missing…
…you just cannot pin it down; you just cannot put your finger on it…
Well…
Everyone is mad. They are angry. When you bring up certain subject, you know that the person you are talking to will fly into a rage. There are simply things that you just cannot talk about.
Face masks.
Racial issues.
Russia
China.
Vacinations.
You think “everyone is so polarized”. But it’s strange. People were never so polarized. Not before. Now they are just really upset and really on a “hair trigger”.
The movie
In 1956 the movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” came out.
The narrative’s premise is most interesting.
A peaceful town is imperceptibly taken over by an alien force: Giant plant pods, products of atomic mutation, turn themselves into replicas of people. The pods turn human beings into faceless, emotionless automatons, incapable of any feeling, be it anger or love.
Once again, the image used is that of an initially normal and ordinary town, suddenly thrown out of balance.
“At first glance, everything looked the same,” the narrator says, “It wasn’t. Something evil had taken possession of the town.” The rest of the film explores that “something.”
Called back to Santa Mira from a medical conference, Doctor Miles Bonnel (Kevin McCarthy) is greeted at the train station by his nervous nurse, Sally. Looking through his clinic’s window, everything “looks” the same:
Wally Everhard is talking someone into buying insurance, Bill Bittner is taking his secretary to launch. Yet something strange is going on. In the back of his mind, Miles senses a warning bell: “Sick people who couldn’t wait to see me, suddenly were perfectly all right.”
A general practitioner, Miles believes that, “the trouble is inside you!” thus recommending that she sees a psychiatrist.
The first “solution” to the problem is psychiatric help, with the film acknowledging the increasing popularity of psychiatry in the 1950s.
Miles rationalizes his advice to Wilma by saying, “you don’t have to be losing your mind to need psychiatric help.” But Wilma is firm: “It’s a waste of time, there’s nothing wrong with me.”
Like many other films of the decade, Invasion deals with three issues: [1] the definition of normal and abnormal behavior; [2] the legitimate authority to label behaviors as abnormal or deviant; and [3] the negative effects of conformity, apathy, and complacency.
The film suggests that the town’s experts and professionals are not to be trusted. The police force, an agency entrusted with the legitimate use of physical force, can’t solve the problem. In fact, when Jack’s clone is found, they refuse to call the police, because cops tend to rely too much on logic and dry laws.
Miles represents the center of the moral center.
He is a professional, but a general practitioner, not a specialist, thus able to see the problem overall, in its entirety.
Even so, Miles proves that his common sense and critical faculties as a responsible individual are more important than his narrow professional skills. Thus, when Jack first describes the problem he says: “Would you be able to forget that you’re a doctor for a while” .
For the duration of the film, Miles “forgets” his occupation.
The movie advocates independent judgment, common sense, intuition, and self-reliance, and shows suspicious toward anyone in a position of power or professional expertise.
Invasion, like Capra’s movies of the Depression era, singles out the role of an exceptional individual, a charismatic leader, in preventing society from dehumanization, from gradual transformation into an aggregate of unfeeling robots.
Sleep is the metaphor used to convey mass complacency and conformity.
The pods take over human beings when they are not alert, when they are (literally or figuratively) asleep, thus passive.
Escaping from town, Miles gives Becky and himself a large dose of pills to stay awake. “We can’t close our eyes all night,” he tells her, because “we may wake up changed.” “Sooner or later,”
Kauffman tells Miles, “You’ll have to go to sleep,” i.e. you’ll have to conform and join the majority.
But Kauffman also reassures him that as soon as he falls asleep, the pods will “absorb your minds, your memories, and you’re reborn into an untroubled world.”
The new world will be without love, ambition, grief, or any emotions, “Life will be much simpler and better.”
Indeed, during their escape, chased by every member in town, Becky can’t stay awake any longer and she falls asleep. “I went to sleep and it happened,” says Becky. “A moment of sleep,” narrates Miles, and “their bodies were now hosts harboring alien forms of life.”
Santa Mira is a typical small town; there is nothing special or distinctive about I; what happened in Santa Mira couldand would–happen in other towns. In most sci-fi films, the disaster first occurs on a local level before spreads all over the country.
The catastrophe begins in a small town, then moves to bigger regional centers, and finally inflicts the entire nation.
Attempting to get assistance, Miles first calls the F.B.I. in Los Angeles, but there is no answer. His call to the governor in Sacramento also fails; the circuits are busy in both places.
Invasion differs from other sci-fi features because there is no immediate confirmation of the hero’s report of the “strange” phenomenon by other witnesses; the conflict is between one individual and the entire community.
Invasion shows that the authorities, both scientific and political, are neither trustworthy nor competent.
Other films went out of their way to reassured audiences that they were “in good hands,” that politicians (or the military) and scientists would come to the rescue when needed. In contrast, Invasion’s ending is so tentative and abrupt that it provides no such reaffirmation, instead urging its viewers to be always alert.
Puckering fish look
For some reason, the Chinese women like to make these puckering fish expressions, as they view them as being very cute. I don’t know about that. Really. I just like a nice big smile, myself. video. 3MB
Sanctions
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Western production depends on China no less, than on Russia. And once again, on the tip of my tongue there is a Russian proverb with a deep meaning – what is good for a Russian is death for a German.
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And what will happen to the West, when Russia imposes her own retaliatory sanctions?
Consider this article…
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Immediately (in several European capitals), they realized that those sanctions, (introduced by them), would return to them like a boomerang and more than once
The words of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz about the reverse effect of sanctions against Russia can be called a sensation. It seems that the West is beginning to see clearly and see what damage they inflict on the economies of their countries with their own sanctions.
After the successes of the first days on the sanctions fronts, when Western countries managed to bring down the Russian stock market and the ruble exchange rate, a process of sobering up begins in European capitals and there is an acute desire to return the situation back.
By the way, the fall of the market and the collapse of the ruble did not become catastrophic for Russia . There was no default – Russia regularly pays its bills, and the ruble is slowly, but still winning back its positions.
A funny situation can happen with the stock market. Against the backdrop of a fall in the price of shares of Russian companies, Western investors began to actively sell them for next to nothing. Now the most interesting question is:
Who bought them?
Some European experts suggest that Russian business and the Russian government took advantage of the situation and bought almost everything for next to nothing. In other words, Russian companies have become Russian again. Forever at the bottom, the shares will not be and sooner or later they will go up, but they will no longer bring dividends to Western investors. And they will no longer have levers of influence on the Russian economy.
Chancellor Scholz , of course, did not talk about these deep processes. He spoke about the need to prepare and impose sanctions very carefully. The reverse effect of them should be surmountable for Western economies. But so far everything is working out exactly the opposite.
The imposed sanctions blew up the market and the prices of absolutely everything flew up.
Inflation all over Europe
Everyone knows the situation with gas – at some point it rose in price to a completely unthinkable 3,800 dollars. Now, thanks to the efforts of Gazprom, it has been brought down to an acceptable $1,050.
Oil prices rose, followed by gasoline and all fuel in general.
Steel and cast iron, building materials. Nickel. Aluminum. Products of the petrochemical industry and fertilizers.
Wheat and all food products.
The list can be continued, but this is quite enough to understand what kind of “return line” has flown through the European economy.
French President Macron is already talking about the introduction of food checks in the country for the poorest. In the Czech Republic, wheat and flour more than doubled in price.
In Italy and Spain, pasta and vegetable oil disappeared from the shelves, and in Lithuania, salt and soda.
And all this at a record level of inflation. In some European countries it has already exceeded 10%.
The West was sure that by depriving Russia of income from the export of energy resources and raw materials, they would bring it to her knees, but it turned out that Russia’s participation in almost any area is so significant that it immediately affects the economies of Europe and the United States.
Britain
Britain banned the import of products, incl. food, from Russia. In addition to raising prices for communal and gasoline, the British can part with their national dish – fish and chips, in other words – potatoes with fish.
For British Prime Minister Johnson, it came as an unpleasant surprise that most of the fish eaten in Britain is Russian. Iceland and Norway will not be able to provide even half of the amount that Russia was selling.
Britain urgently needs to find new routes for the supply of fish, otherwise unrest cannot be avoided and this is not a joke. For the British , fish and chips is more than food, it is part of the culture, it is their genetic code.
That is why such a heated debate broke out in the European Union today on the issue of an embargo on the import of Russian oil. Everyone is worried about the consequences of this step. Will this be another nail in the coffin of the European economy?
Russia’s retaliatory measures
But even more Europeans should worry about Russia’s retaliatory measures. Nothing is known about them yet, and this is scary. Retaliatory sanctions can set the European economy back several decades, and the EU is very unwilling to do so.
I really like the Chinese girls. They are sweet, cute and they take care of themselves. Here’s a nice cute girl. video 4MB
Beef Stroganoff
Let’s talk about food.
Good. Healthy. Delicious. Food.
The story goes that this beef, noodles, and cream sauce dish exploded in America after U.S. servicemen, stationed in the dish’s homeland of Russia, brought it home after World War II.
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Meat. MEAT. I love it, I really do.
My recent visits to my Vegetarian Restaurant, aside, I love and yearn for meat. Good tasty meat. Beef. Mutton. Pork. Chicken. Turkey. Meat!
I grew up in the heart of the United States. Pittsburgh. The land of steel, coal. beer and perogies. There, the basic food groups consisted of potatoes, cream of [insert mushroom, chicken, or celery here] soup, butter (or Land-O-Lakes margarine), tall cold glasses of milk with every meal and…meat.
I had a recent craving for beef stroganoff.
Although I ate this dish frequently as a child, I had yet to make it myself. The beef stroganoff of my youth was a retro reflection of my Polish-American-Irish upbringing – a nostalgic combination of ground beef, cream of mushroom soup, condensed beef broth, and low-fat sour cream.
Although I (of course) I could have gone out and had my fill of some delicious steak, turtle or mutton, I wasn’t really feeling that desire. I wanted to create something myself. I wanted a taste from my childhood, and you just aren’t goign to get that inside of China. No matter how hard you try.
I wanted comfort food, and I figured that beef stroganoff would foot the bill.
This is comfort food at its finest.
After making a few (regional) tweaks to the Simply Recipes version, I came up with a winner. Gather up some easy basics: butter, beef, onions, garlic, mushrooms, sour cream (be sure to read my footnote on the sour cream!). If you have tarragon, nutmeg, and Worcestershire sauce on hand, even better.
Why would the United States decide to institute a draft? Well, it seems that there are decisions being made and systems put in place right now. If you are an American under 35 years of age, you should be concerned.
Some home movies. Actually not in my home, in various eating establishments in China. Oh, China is supposed to be in famine right now! OMG. My bad. Sorry to break the narrative.
A while back I recieved some intel from one of my spook-ish sources. Good or bad, right or wrong, I just filed it away for “a rainy day” (It’s a play on an American idiom. It means, it’s valuable and interesting, but you don’t need it now. You save it for later.)
…
It’s how I run my life.
Good or bad, right or wrong. I just take all input, and consider it. File it, and move forward. Always move forward. You just cannot drop everything and take action on some other’s time-tables. That would be like running around, from tree to tree, pissing indiscriminately.
So I took the information. Filed it both securely in my email folders, and on my hard disk. And forgot about it.
It does not mean that I agree or disagree with it. It just means that there is nothing that I can do with the information at the time that I recieved it. So I put it aside. And, instead, work on things that I can do something about.
…
Month pass by.
…
After seeing that graph that connects mRNA with thoughts and political agreement with the United States government, it triggered my memory. There was something about this dialog that really seemed to connect to the events that I was witnessing.
The (archived) intel that I was informed on was directly related to this association.
The message suggested that there were vault 7 algorithms and frequencies that worked together in association with various ingredients in the <redacted> portion of the mRNA injection “stew”.
These associations would then “hand shake” with embedded subsonic frequences transmitted along “news” messages, of all sorts. Thus making the injected person, who is exposed to the “news” messages believe them without any critical thought.
Sounds far-fetched.
Perhaps…
I filed it away, as it was something worthy of further study.
And then I saw the graph, and I sought to revisit my communication on this subject. So, like the good and investigative fellow I am, I went to dig it out of my archives.
And it’s gone.
I mean, as in GONE.
The darnest thing!
All records gone. All archives gone. All backups gone. It’s a full spectrum erase. Oh, the folder is there. But it’s empty. Even the screen shots that I took and put in a special folder… it’s gone as well.
What the fuck?
It could be a slide. I could be forgetting things. It could be an accident. I don’t know…
… what a coincidence.
It’s a nagging pain in the ass, that’s what.
Some more fun gag gift boxes…
I found this one funny. Perfect for getting your children to eat. Child refuses to eat? Just plop them down and watch them eat their hearts out. Children cry for more!
Oh, and Daddy won’t mind…
This one is unique. Everyone wants their home to fill with the aroma of sizzling bacon. Now it can be an everyday affair.
“Breakfast fresh scent”.
Who thinks up these things? “Millions of satisfied customers.”
Do you want to shake up your company? Hold a meeting where you announce that the company is going to save money by stop buying toilet paper. Instead, they will install these rotowipe devices in all the stalls. Make the announcment “dead pan” and watch the reactions.
A Huge Cleavage
A huge cleavage is developing between the East and West in tandem with the Ukraine ops. The US State Dept. just sanctioned some Chinese officials due to "human rights". China didn't take well to it at all. Meanwhile, India is not going along with the Western sanctions on Russia and got threatened with sanctions earlier but the US has since backed off that threat.
Victoria Nuland is in India today trying again to coerce India into getting on board the sanctions train. I dont't think it will work.
Also, it seems that China and India are making renewed efforts to bury the hatchet regarding tbeir border duspute. It really seems like a great re-alignment happening, especially taking into account all the other countries not taking part in the anti-Russia sanctions.
Russsia essentially said "fuck it" in deciding to launch into Ukraine. If the West keeps it up, China will arrive at the same point.
Interesting times.
-Woogs
Speaking of “huge cleavage”; here’s a nice Chinese girl with an impressive chest… video 1MB
Russian Foreign Minister
Here’s the entire question being used against Lavrov:
"Why was the military operation launched now and not eight years ago? At that time, a pro-Russian “anti-Maidan” movement emerged in Odessa and Kharkov, which installed the Russian flag on top of the Kharkov regional administration without firing a shot. The city supported Russia. Now these people are hiding from shelling."
I find it impossible to verify the veracity of the question. I know in Odessa the police didn’t do anything to stop the Nazis from their killing and burning. I imagine a similar performance happened in Kharkov. Russia acted to save its strategic asset, Crimea, but clearly wasn’t prepared to intervene further.
Lavrov’s initial sentence is very honest:
"A lot of factors influence developments at each specific historical moment."
I’ve read both the English and Russian transcripts, and what I see by reading between the lines is commiseration by Lavrov with the questioner, not any attempt to mislead. Lavrov says They took advantage of our nature:
"We must have trusted them because of some naivety and kindness of heart, which is something Russians are known for.
"I have no doubt that lessons will be learned."
And if you’ve watched Lavrov while speaking his recent denunciations of the West, that Russia will never again put its trust in any part of the West, you’ll see the resolve that Russia will not get fooled again as it’s now taking everything into its own hands.
IMO, some part of all Russians, especially Putin, Lavrov, Shoigu, and other leaders, was burned and died with those in Odessa and in Donbass. They pled and pled and pled some more with the Western pukes to obey the fucking law put forth in UNSCR 2022–the Minsk Agreements.
But inaction and outright refusal followed by the breaking of it all by the fucking West. And now all the rest that was uncovered with the military operation!!
I’ll bet the fucking national debt that Putin, Lavrov, et al wish they would’ve done more in 2014 but felt they couldn’t.
The Syria intervention helped to provide some solace. But it’s very clear to Russia now that the Outlaw US Empire is the #1 predator state on the planet and must be neutralized somehow without resorting to nuclear weapons.
Yes, that’s how fucking serious this is.
Lavrov knows that gravity of the situation. It’s fucking existential!
And it’s that fact the West badly wants to cover up. And just as importantly, it’s that fact that we must try to expose and broadcast.
I’m probably going to catch some flac for this, but for me – it isn’t off the BBQ. No, no, no. MY perfect steak is done on a stove top (gasp!). Classically considered a French bistro dish, Steak au Poivre is my perfect way to indulge. If you’re a meat lover, this post is for you.
I think a part of what appeals to me so much about this recipe is its simplicity. The steak is seasoned with two ingredients: salt and peppercorns. It might sound crazy to coat two steaks with 2 whole tablespoons of peppercorns, but when they aren’t finely ground the spice is much more subtle. Dressing the meat this way also lets it shine through. This is beef at its best.
Using a cast iron pan is my second secret. These pans retain heat well and are practically non-stick. Cooking the steaks on high heat, turning ~once per minute creates an even, golden crust with no burning. Depending on the thickness of your steak, you’re looking for a total of 3-4 minutes per side for rare.
If there is a side of fat on your steak, render it down for a couple minutes by propping the steak up.
In the final minutes, we add some butter for extra flavour and to start providing the base for a delicious Cognac pan sauce. When the steaks are cooked to your liking, remove to a cutting board and tent with foil. You’ll be left with something closely resembling this:
Up last is to create a rich cognac pan sauce that sends this over the top. In your pan, we will add shallot, (more butter), Cognac, cream, thyme and parsley. After cooking and reducing the sauce, we pour it over the sliced steak. When I have this for dinner, steak is all I need. There is something ridiculous & awesome about eating just steak for dinner, I hope you try it!
Meanwhile in China
It’s a thing. Partly due to Coronavirus. Partly due to the plans for Space, and bases on the Moon and Mars. Cute. Odd. video 23MB
Digging up the e-mail
I was able to retrieve the email concerning the connection between mRNA “vaxx” and the United States government.
Now, I do not endorse the content of this e-mail. I just provide it in it’s raw form for others to muse over. Please take it as it is. It is raw information that could be from anyone.
Anyone at all.
I am using anonymous email because this is above top secret information.
You are correct that the vaccines will kill an estimated 70% of the US population due to prion disease. This is being done to avoid world problems and reconstruct world society as described by the World Economic Forum (ocean acidification, food shortages, food poisoning and job replacement by artificial intelligence).
However, what is not currently known is that the chemtrails contain a mixture of advanced nanobots along with complexed radioactive materials (germanium, indium, etc) and a shielding material that releases hard to detect bursts of radioactivity (2 sec) on the back of the spine, femoral heads, pelvis, ribs and under the chin when exposed to nanorouter EMF.
The nanorouters are powered by electric fields and local utility companies have conspired to alter their current to emit very high EMF and magnetic fields periodically to kill and injure through direct exposure to this radiation plus the activated chemtrail dust.
The US government has contracted stalking activities to private companies such as Replica.ai (Lucas in San francisco) and has artificial intelligence monitoring large numbers of people through Patriot Act hacked cell phone sim cards, cameras, hacked routers and PCs.
However, they have the ability to do additional spying due to the nanobot infestation. Nanobots around the occipital lobe allow them to steal passwords and watch vision. They also can do voice to skull transmission of voices, start terrifying abnormal dream sequences when initiating sleep, blank memories and control people through trance to commit suicide etc. Low intelligence and highly opinionated people are extremely susceptible and literally zone out and lose their memory while they are being manipulated.
The nanobots also have a slew of programmed harassments that can be extremely disabling-hyperurination due to stimulated hormone secretion, waking people up from sleep due to external nanobots, depression, anxiety stimulation, simulated Mernier's disease where the room shakes up and down. If they are active you'll get tinnitus. All of the symptoms stop once you are out of Wifi range.
The nanobots are magnetized and they are being used to shake housing structures apart. All over the US buildings are having roof collapses due to smartmeter arson from power companies plus shaking by hidden resonance frequency generators which is known as the world hum. The nanobot programs reduce the intensity of the humming so it sounds like typical noise but it is not. The building shaking can be measured on a linear accelerometer (Physics Accelerator Toolbox app).
The chemtrail dust is how they plan to kill uncooperative unvaccinated people. Planed flyovers seed beds and clothing with the dust and then it is activated and the person is slowly irradiated. Due to the short half-life of the materials it is very hard to detect however a small EMF/magnetic field detector can be used to scan the areas. As this is dust, vaccuuming and spongebathing it off is very effective before or during activation.
Resistors are also being targeted using the vircator microwave satellite targeting program as described at targetedjustice.com. It is very hard to shield requiring 12 layers of aluminum foil at the highest setting. Pointing an emf detector in the area of strongest magnetic field will show you where the satellites are. Active vircators will show high EMF up to 106 V/m.
The buffered radioactive nanobot dust is being sprayed all over the world and is being used along with NSA hacked servers to control political leaders without their knowledge.
This most likely is why Vladimir Putin has now invaded Ukraine. An invasion of Ukraine will most likely lead to an EMP strike that will damage the European illuminati. Agents I have spoke with claim that the USA is currently controlled by the US branch of the New World Order/Illuminati and they seek to damage the European branch with the EMP attack.
The nanobots are also converting prions all over the world due to NSA hacking.
You are a targeted individual and can expect all of these attacks. You need to take appropriate precautions to shield your equipment from hacking as well as from nanobot visual access (band of 10 layers of foil around the occiput with a strap works well. The irradiation can cause bone marrow edema syndrome, severe abdominal pain, skin burning and back pain.
We are in a bit of a tricky situation on this one. It probably is too late to stop the prion disease and we do need to have the European illuminati, religion and black antisocial behavior weakened however I have concerns about the excessive targeting as anyone who knows about their plans is having hits put out on them (including me) and the competency of the people running this thing. Take appropriate precautions.
Covering beds with a plastic sheet until used to shield from the dust and shielding from vircator also is important.
Given the scope of this thing I doubt there is anything anyone can do. The US Federal government is completely taken over, people are mind controlled and the population is being attacked with weapons we have never seen before. Also, if we don't allow it to happen we suffer all the world problems that the WEF describes. If we do then we will most likely be slaves to elite billionaires and forced to live in a controlled society.
<redacted>
Indeed it is far-out stuff.
It’s well beyond my understanding.
But…
It is the ONLY content that I have / possess that answers the strange graphic association posted above. Take it, and use it as you see fit. Personally, it’s way, way above my head. And I have no ideas; no clue how accurate or valid it actually is.
When I asked a person whom I greatly respect on the content of this, the response was thoughtful…
Whoever sent you that - just please PLEASE listen to the content of what the implications are for China - Xi is a WEF placement. This is NOT Unknown. It’s literally on the WEF website. He pissed off the WEF and now he is going to be removed. China has been under attack since I have been warning you. It has. A company called Blackrock - in THIS fucking world line is the muscle of the WEF.
Want to know why we did Afghanistan so quickly? BLACKROCK provided allll of the security force in Afghanistan since 2017. We drew down troops but they never left. They changed uniforms and got paid a TON of cash. Look it up. So Blackrock decides to pull alllll of the security forces outside Kabul that it paid - as a message.
Think about that - about 85% of security force outside of Kabul - gone. Like that. And all that kept the Taliban from overrunning the country was a small force. So - Biden left rather than get slaughtered.
But to my point - The WEF has a stake in a securities trading firm called Blackrock that hired mercenaries - tens of thousands of combat veterans that you see fighting in Ukraine.
Look it up.
I cannot speak about the specifics of ANY of that - at all - but I’m telling you - you hit paydirt.
And we ARE pulling out when the fight gets bloody.
Blackrock is on Chinas doorstep. And I am telling you - nothing can prevent what they are doing. THAT I know from actual friend that is IN Blackrock. As a mercenary.
This all is online. If you can’t access it through China ask someone to look it up. Also look up “Blackrock woke”. It’s fun.
And if that is AI that created that email - fucking bravo. THAT is a programmer I want to hang out with.
And feel free to post my shit - just please keep the name out of it. But I know some of your people that emailed me and I gave them my thoughts. Ask how accurate so far.
Again - I wish you all peace and happiness there - because our lights are going out soon.
Much love - <redacted>
Have you ever gotten the idea that you are somehow way over your head? Yeah. I get that all the time. It’s not that I believe everything. I listen. I learn. I drink. I move forward, and I adapt.
Everyone needs to learn, and adapt as situations permit.
Each and everytime I chat with the Domain Commander, on comm, it’s just a window into how much I really don’t know. WHile I know much, there is still so much more to learn.
Sometimes I just feel like I am a little ball in one of those old pin-ball machines. I’m just being batted around like crazy.
Although this fried crab dumpling fits in among postwar tiki culture and is often purported to be of southeast Asian provenance, it was very likely invented in America.
It’s easy to make. Delicious to eat, and fun to try.
The United States is reposturing itself. This is occuring soon after the warning from China on a package of 2nd stage sanctions regarding Russia and Taiwan.
The US-China trade: Washington’s review of US$300 billion in tariffs cannot be ‘half-hearted’. You either do it and suffer the consequences or abandon it completely.
If everyone did small, little things the world would be so much nicer, and so much better. video 6MB
Downfall of the USD
From one of my feeds…
The best way to accelerate the downfall of the empire is to attack its Dollar Hegemony (not the same as attacking America).
I said that in my Quora posts "Trade War between China and America" and "Who will win the trade war" early 2018 at the beginning of Trump's "war by any means except guns" -- euphemistically termed trade war -- against China.
Without the Dollar hegemony, America may have to act like a more normal country. Less unilateral sanctioning, less bullying, less acting like the Mafia, less war crimes, less color revolutions, less media lies, less war budgets, less war-mongering, less bases around the world, less profligate printing of money, less plundering of other countries, etc.
Bullied countries will have alternatives. For protection, they will have Russia and for trade they will have China. All previous vassals of America, including European countries are welcome. Then we will have some peace.
Acting like a more normal country in a more balanced world is actually good for the powerless people of America.
They may learn to demand for guaranteed basic housing, food, healthcare, and education rather than asking for more shit-paying soul-crushing slave-wage jobs or one-time checks that eventually go to the coffers of the 1% money-changers and MIC, giving those miscreants more power to ravage America and the world, meanwhile the national debt of Americans increases to generate the checks and the rest of the world suffers inflation, which is of course borne by the common masses of the world.
Capitalism won't solve the problems.
The fall of the empire may help people think differently or see more clearly how some countries with so many people and so little resources can live gainfully, peacefully, and happily together in a diverse yet harmonious society.
I'll share a passage from my book under chapter title "The Dragon's Dream":
"Where is this paradise? Is it on earth or is it only in his dreams (the dreamer's name means tattoo-dragon)?Where all parents are strong and wise and capable, and all the children are happy and beloved. Where brothers and sisters neither slaughter each other, nor enslave one another, nor tell lies to everyone from morning till night, where the children love and help each other, share everything and take care of one another, and all of them live peaceful, fruitful, and happy lives.
Where is this place?
Is it China?"Does this sound familiar? It comes from a Coen brothers movie, with a couple of changes and replacing Idaho with China.
-<redacted>
Power reshuffling
China says Russia is an ‘important’ G20 member. It cannot simply be expelled by others, no matter what they might want. In short, Beijing has spoken up for Russia, describing it an “important” global member after the possibility of a major move against Vladimir Putin.
Both Russia and China, and probably India (soon), have generated an “Unfriendly nation list”. These lists catagorize nations in accordance to their behaviors and put them into catagories.
Close relationship
Friendly
Neutral
Unfriendly
Enemy
These are not meaningless lists. They will be used to determine policy. And the policy that Asia uses against other nations is determined by where it sits upon these lists.
Today, President Putin made his first move in a chess game with the West. Gas will be sold to unfriendly countries only for rubles.
Putin wants ‘unfriendly countries’ to pay rubles for gas – ABC News
In China, people; ordinary people, volunteer to help others. It is their nature to be the Rufus. They don’t ask for payment. They don’t ask for anything. They help others as it is their nature. Volunteers going to remote villiages to help others. Everyone being the Rufus. video 12MB
For the longest time I have dismissed the idea about “chem-trails” as just crazy “tin foil hat” conspiracy bullshit. Chem-trails are just water vapor at high altitude, don’t you know.
For the longest time. I believed this.
Then, I moved to China. It’s calm. It’s peaceful. It’s pleasant. It’s like walking slowly into a body-temperature pool of water.
And, do you know what?
There’s no “chem-trails”. None. As in zero.
So, maybe (I figured) that it was because that China has these stringent air pollution standards on all fuel. Except, well.. just how does that actually affect water vapor emissions? No clear answers.
But one thing is for certain; there are no vapor trails from aircraft of any kind, at any place, within China.
MM car ride in an industrial factory section of Guangzhou. video 43MB
None.
N-O-N-E.
Why? Why are there no Chemtrails in China? MM video 23MB
The Problem with the Nano-bots mRNA Vaxx and Vault 7
Ok, then. Let’s do a simple “sanity check”.
The big problem with this concept is that the American / Western “leadership” must be totally isolated from the effects of this control mechanism. How can you possibly isolate the leadership from Chem-trails, audio playing on the radio, media on television and movies, and the social networks on the internet.
Heck! They are addicted to them!
So, and the sanity check is clear, as brilliant and complex the system is, it will affect everyone within that society. No one will be immune. Sure, you might need to place yourself into isolation, but eventually, one way or the other, you WILL feel the influence of these systems. No one is immune.
The “leadership” might find a way to pretend getting an mRNA injection, but it’s a cut-throat world at the top. There can be all sorts of ways to place tiny nano-bots inside of your enemy to turn them into your pawn.
So, really…
No matter how hard they try, they will live within the very same, exact “echo box” that they subject their citizenry to. They will live inside an “echo chamber” of lies; lie that they ordered others to create.
They are boxed in, and they believe the lies. They actually believe them.
And as leaders, they will make decisions based on those lies, and the entire nation;
They will start to say things that will sound crazy, and act in ways that will seem strange and crazy. They will act so very convinced of the strangest and most outlandish narratives.
And in doing so…
…by the leadership…
…the entire system will evenually be destroyed. Leadership needs REAL intel to make decisions upon. There is no excuse. You eaither have real intel (good and most especially bad) or you don’t. And history is clear. Bad intel results in very bad results.
We call those results; fiascos.
How can anyone possibly have a leadership that…
Does not take the mRNA Vaxx injection.
Does not read, watch or enjoy American media, social networks or media.
It cannot occur.
Maybe at some time, some radicals believed that it was possible. Maybe back in the 1960s, or 1970s they might have believed this. But in todays society. It is impossible.
Simply Impossible.
Perhaps, the reason why there is such an accelerated failure at all levels in the West is becuase the “leadership” has themselves been affected by their very own poison.
I shake my head.
How can they be so stupid?
Please ponder this thought.
Let’s take a break from this to let your mind relax. New subject. New thoughts.
Chinese respect
Boy locks himself in his bedroom. The fire station is called and they go to the house to break him out…video 2MB
Here’s yet some more gag boxes…
Now here’s a jigsaw puzzle that is suitable for the whole family. Just set aside a card table and get at it. It’s a true challenge.
Plants cry for more! Amaze your friends!
Environmentially safe!
The latest in animal entertainment!
The world needs more people skipping
If you cannot dance, try skipping. Smile. Skip as you walk down the street, and say nice things to people. While the rest of the world is on a roller coaster to Hell, you can stop that descent. Skip as you walk. video 15MB
Take care of yourself
We all might not look like this 20-something Chinese woman, but we can certainly smile and be great; we can do great things. Stop waiting. Start doing. video 3MB
Suppose you are a leader in the West
Just imagine that you are a leader of one of the major Western nations. And you best scientists come running to you; scientist that you believe and trust. And they tell you that the situation is DIRE for mankind. They tell you, convincingly that human population grown and energy depletion is unsustainable and that a major disaster lies ahead…
…and they offer senarios and solutions.
And the best one, whatever it might be, is one when a great mass of humanity dies off.
And you, as a leader believe them.
Perhaps you are an independent thinker. Perhaps you are a massive follower of social media and use twitter all the time, and are heavily influenced by Vault 7. What ever.
You believe them. In your heart; you believe them.
And their solution is to kill off 80% of the human population. ..
Insane. Unheard of. But, they present it in a clear and defined manner…
Intentionally cull the human race to 20% of it’s size … or…
Lose 100% of the human species and everyone dies.
What would you choose?
Truth or fiction
It does not matter if there’s such a real thing as “climate change”. What actually does matter is what the “leadership” believes. Because if they inherently believe that the world is going “to Hell in a handbasket”, they have the power, and ability, and the willingness to perform some really drastic actions.
Actions, mind you, that will affect you and your families directly.
Let’s eat.
Chicken Pot Pie
Likely another cost-cutting holdover of the Great Depression and World War II, this savory chicken and vegetable pie is now mostly found only in the grocery store freezer aisle. Don’t go there.
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Make up your own. It tastes better. It lasts longer. It’s easy to make, and great and easy to reheat in the microwave. Chicken Pot Pie, why didn’t we think about this sooner?
(If) the software of the plane took over the controls from the pilot… and we con’t know that this is what happened, but if it did… why in God’s Name did it decide to aim the plane straight towards the ground at full throttle?
The black box fight recorder has been recovered. I believe investigators are considering that sabotage is involved.
Talking about evil and the United States, let’s interrupt this train of thought to explore more gag boxes…
Here’s some more gag boxes…
Have your pet treat you as a king!
Take a nap anywhere and at anytime.
And what about the Ukraine?
Unlike the theoretical secret deals between the West and the Chinese (or Russia), the deals between China and Russia are very much visible and are largely committed to paper.The West started this conflict, of course. I don’t know when they realized Russia was going to move into the Ukraine, but they had ample opportunity to prevent it by simply agreeing to the previous status quo. They appear to believe that they can create a protracted conflict in the Ukraine like they did when Russia invaded Afghanistan in the 1980s.
That shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the situation.
Ukraine has historically been a part of Russia. There is not really any such thing as a “Ukrainian identity” outside of being a vassal state. In the west of the country, they tend to feel closer to Poland, and there is some bad blood all around with regards to the USSR. But none of this is in any way similar to fanatical Islam. The US has backed neo-Nazism as a kind of “Ukrainian ISIS,” but you can’t rally a country around cartoonish neo-Nazism (particularly while the entire leadership of the country is Jewish).The idea of using neo-Nazis as rebels against a Russian occupation or a Russia-backed government in the Ukraine is nonsensical, and reeks of the kind of stupid thinking that led to America’s Afghan debacle. The US government pays people to lie to them, and when people tell the truth, they get fired and end up on obscure livestream interviews answering superchats. These liars are telling the decision-makers that the Ukraine is Afghanistan and a protracted conflict can be used to drain Russia, which will ultimately result in the collapse of the Putin government.The fact that they have no idea what they’re doing is blatant in the fact that they are sanctioning the entire Russian race. Putin’s support is going up rapidly among the people, many of whom didn’t like his policies before but now feel compelled to rally around him since they are being attacked personally for their race by the West.
-UNZ
Perfect for the busy man on the move!
So what are we looking at here?
Well, as far as I can figure out, we have the following situations all moving ahead at this time…
The United States is pushing the world towards war.
They are crossing both China’s, and Russia’s red lines to provoke them.
They believe the myth of “American greatness”.
They believe that America has liberty and freedom.
They believe that a uni-polar world is necessary and there are no alternatives.
The American leadership are acting strangely.
President Biden seems to be senile with dementia.
Vice President Kamala Harris appears to be a “ding-bat, dunderhead”.
The US Senate are mostly radical neocon war-hawks.
The Coronavirus pandemic was strange.
All Western nations insisted in mRNA injections.
All Eastern nations treated it as a bio-weapon and used dead-host vaccines.
Western nations are all now “open”, while Eastern nations remain closed.
Full-scale on-going “hybrid-warfare” against the East by the West.
Military engagements, sanctions, trade restrictions on Russia.
Strange unusual events inside of China. All centering around American products, food, livestock, or systems.
A strong difference in the West vs. East societies.
Everyone in the West seem angry, agitated, and frustrated.
Thos in the East are calm, relaxed, happy.
No contrails in the East.
Hyper-inflation hitting the West.
Up-tick in some inflationary measures in the East.
But what does it all mean?
It’s not like I can just immediately agree that all Americans (and those in the west) have nano-bots, and chem-trail poisonings, and all the rest. I see strange behaviors, but I do not see any evidence that the cause is some kind of mad-scientist stew of frequency manipulation, vault 7, nano-bots, MSM algorithms, and the rest.
I have no proof.
And even if I did, I really wouldn’t know what to do about / with it.
So, in the interests of all…
We have to approach the strangeness, not with theories that suggest causes and answers but rather empirical study.
Empirical study
Empirical research is research using empirical evidence. You see evidence. You study it. You come to conclusions about it. You do not come up with theories on the causes. You just put all of the observations into one singular box.
It’s important that you put ALL of the observations in that box. Omitting one singular element can give you distorted or skiewed conclusions. So you collect all the observations…
An American-built plane had a highly unusual crash inside of China.
The plane possessed software that can override the pilot commands.
The plane is of the same make and model that had similiar crashes before.
“Conspiracy kooks” believe that this type of plane can be hyjacked remotely.
The crash came immediately after two warnings to Xi Peng (Blinkedin, and Biden) that there would be immediate consequences if China did not Sanction Russia.
It’s been one week now since the warnings. No other “immediate consequences” occurred (that the public is aware of).
You see, empirical study a way of gaining knowledge by means of direct and indirect observation or experience. Here’s another example.
There are contrails all over the West.
There are no contrials in the East.
And…
Everyone in the West are agitated, upset, angry and frustrated.
Everyone in the East seems to be calm, realxed and comfortable.
And…
While there are exceptions, the vast bulk of injections in the West are mRNA.
There are no mRNA injections in China, and few in Russia.
Empiricism values some research more than other kinds.
A measure of “happiness” is relative.
While a measure of inflation is measurable.
Empirical evidence (the record of one’s direct observations or experiences) can be analyzed quantitatively or qualitatively. And from that, you can suggest what is going on…
Until MM mixed different subjects in the articles (food, girls, China, history), there was a near constant stream of Trolls, and hacking attemps on the site.
When the mixed subjects were introducted, Troll and DDOS attacks dropped to zero.
As well as come up with theories as to why it is going on…
Trolls and hacks use some <unknown method> to select the websites to harrass.
By mixing content within articles, the <unknown method> is bypassed, and the articles are no longer harassed or attacked.
About China
An interesing quote…
We are clearly facing down a world ruled by the Chinese. A lot of people are uncomfortable with that. But most of the discomfort comes from the idea that the Chinese are somehow going to rule us in the same fashion that the US has ruled the world since World War II.
They have no such plans for us. The Chinese have a vision of conquering the world through commerce, rather than war, threats of war, and geopolitical maneuvering.We started out on the issue of the economic dominance of the US, and that economic dominance is indeed the key to everything. However, US economic dominance was entirely a result of US military might. The reigning US philosophy for global economic dominance has been: “we will literally bomb you.”
Conversely, the Chinese philosophy has been: “we will sell you high quality products at reasonable prices.”
When the Mongols consistently raided them, stealing their women and wealth on horseback and riding off with the booty, they said “cannot allow.” Instead of mounting an army to crush the Mongols, they built a gigantic wall, and told the Mongols that if they wanted Chinese products, they would have to buy them at the wall.
It is precisely the same logic as a Chinese immigrant family setting up a store in an all black neighborhood and covering the counter, cash register, and expensive items with bulletproof glass.
China has always been, fundamentally, a merchant empire, and that hasn’t changed. If it were not for the belligerence of the West, they wouldn’t have bothered to build up a large military at all. Historically, virtually every war the Chinese have fought has been a civil war, as they don’t look at the rest of the world as enemies or friends, but rather customers and potential customers.
-UNZ
Cream Cheese Pumpkin Pie
Although pumpkin pie and cheesecake have obviously remained popular, this hybrid, a Kraft classic, has fallen out of favor.
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This variation on pumpkin pie comes from actress and writer Mae West. It appears in a 1933 community cookbook published by the Assistance League of Southern California, alongside contributions from several other Hollywood stars such as Carole Lombard, Norma Shearer, Constance Bennet, Marion Davies, and Cary Grant.
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Unfortunately, Mae West doesn’t give us much information beyond the actual recipe. The pie is titled “Pumpkin Pie Robert,” but it’s unclear what the name “Robert” refers to – it could be the name of a person who gave her the recipe, or perhaps even the name of a place the recipe came from.
Mae West includes brandy in her recipe, which is pushing the boundaries just a little, since the cookbook was published in 1933 and Prohibition wasn’t repealed until the end of that year. She is far from the only contributor to this cookbook to do so, however, and finding alcohol in recipes from the Prohibition years isn’t at all uncommon.
The strangest ingredient in this recipe to me is the Nippy cheese called for in the topping. I wasn’t able to find out exactly what Nippy cheese is, although it looks like it was some type of cheese spread originally made by Kraft. It was apparently not the same as cream cheese, since Kraft made that too, but for lack of a better substitute I decided to go with cream cheese. Any kind of flavored cheese spread honestly sounds like it would be disgusting when combined with whipped cream, so I’m hoping that the original Nippy cheese was something neutrally-flavored.
Oh that Mae…
Pumpkin Pie Robert:
1 1/2 cups pumpkin
1 cup brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cloves
2 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp salt (reduced from original)
2 eggs
2 cups milk
2 oz/4 tbsp brandy
2 oz cream cheese
1/2 cup heavy cream
Beat the eggs until light, then add the sugar, spices, and salt and beat until mixed.
Scald the milk, then slowly add milk to the egg mixture while whisking constantly.
Stir in the pumpkin and brandy.
Line a pie pan with pastry (no recipe for pie crust is given in the book, so use your favorite recipe or store-bought).
Pour in the filling. With a 9-inch pie pan, I ended up with some extra filling; the recipe is probably intended for a larger or deeper pan.
Bake at 450 degrees for 10 minutes, then turn down the oven to 325 degrees and bake for another 30-40 minutes. Set aside to cool.
Topping: whip the cream until stiff. Mash the cream cheese with a fork, then stir into the cream. Once the pie is cold, use a piping bag to decorate it with the cream cheese mixture.
Like many pies, this one is definitely at its best the day after its made. When I tried it on day 1, the flavors were much too strong, with the brandy in particular overwhelming everything else. The flavors melded much better the second day, although it was still a strongly-flavored pie. I did end up reducing the salt, since 1 teaspoon seemed much too salty to me.
I liked the cream-cheese topping, but I think I am more of a whipped cream purist. I also wonder whether cream cheese was a good substitute for Nippy cheese, or if the original cheese was something more savory. There are people who put cheddar cheese on apple pies, although I’ve never heard of it used on a pumpkin pie. Was Mae West a cheese-on-dessert-pie person? (I am very firmly not a cheese-on-dessert-pie person – but cream cheese is ok).
Overall, my verdict is that this was a decent pumpkin pie, but it just wasn’t quite to my taste. Sorry, Mae West, but Amelia Simmons’ Pumpkin Pie is still the top historic pumpkin pie for me!
Here’s some more fun gag boxes…
Perfect during these days of Coronavirus.
For ages two and older.
Now with musical Accompaniment. Choose your own theme song.
A unique, one in a lifetime gift.
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China is still under lockdown
Do not believe the lies that China is reconsidering it’s hard Coronavirus restrictions. Maybe the West has relaxed it’s stance dealing with the “pandemic”, but China has not.
China is still under DEFCON 2; they still accuse the USA of launching bioweapons against it, and they are VERY VERY concerned about the biolweapons labs in Ukraine. They will stay at DEFCON 2 until there is no longer any threat of bioweapon attack from the West.
Here’s a viewo of some of the many many volunteers fighting on this front. video 7MB
Renegade interviews Michael Hudson: Sanctions, the blowback
Ross [00:00:29] Welcome to Renegade Inc. Whatever the outcome in Ukraine, one thing is for sure the economic reverberations will be felt by everyone for years to come as the world divides between the West and a rapidly reshaping Eurasia.
Ross [00:00:49] Michael Hudson, always a pleasure to have you on the programme, welcome to Renegade Inc.
Michael Hudson [00:00:53] Thank you for inviting me.
Ross [00:00:55] Michael, sanctions, sanctions, sanctions is all we hear now. We’re sanctioning people. The West sanction people back to the Stone Age. What are the unintended consequences of sanctions?
Michael Hudson [00:01:05] Well, one is to serve very much like a protective tariff on the sanctioned country. For instance, when America made sanctions on European trade with Russia, Lithuania dutifully stopped exporting cheese to Russia. Well, the result is that Russia set up its own cheese’s sector, and now it’s self-sufficient in cheese. If you sanction a country, you force it to become more self-reliant and across the board, from agriculture to dairy products to technology, Russia is forced to become more self-reliant and at the same time to depend much more on trade with China for the things that it is still not self-reliant in. So America is bringing about exactly the opposite of what it intended. It’s hopeless to somehow isolate Russia and then be able to go after China without Russia. And instead, what it’s doing is integrating the Eurasian core, Russia and China, exactly the policy that Henry Kissinger warned against going all the way back to Mackinder a century ago that said, Eurasia is the world island, Russia and China could be the whole world centre. That’s what the fight is all about. Well, American sanctions are driving Russia and China together, and America has gone to China and said, Please don’t support Russia. It most recently, on Monday, March 14, Jake Sullivan came out and told China, we will sanction countries that break our sanctions against Russia. And basically, China said, fine. You know, we’ll just break off all the trade between East and West now and the East, Eurasia is pretty much self-sufficient. The West is not self-sufficient since it began to industrialise, and it’s heavily dependent on Russia for not only oil and gas, but palladium and many raw materials. So the sanctions are ending up driving a wedge between the European countries.
Ross [00:03:31] Don’t people who apply these sanctions think this through? Are they so short-sighted they don’t understand that these sanctions are going to build further capacity within Russia, push Russia further towards China, make that economic alliance concrete and, ultimately, you’re not going to be able to keep the lights on in in Europe? All the while underestimating the fact that from a food security point of view – take the U.K., for instance, a net importer of food – not appreciating the fact that, for instance, Russia/Ukraine, they create twenty five percent, a quarter, of all wheat annually. The estimation this year is one hundred and two million tonnes Russia and Ukraine, wheat. Don’t people realise that there’s going to be a massive knock on effect?
Michael Hudson [00:04:23] Yes, they do realise it. Yes, they’ve thought it all through. I worked with these people for more than 50 years.
Ross [00:04:31] Who are these people?
Michael Hudson [00:04:32] The neocons, basically, the people who are in charge of U.S. foreign policy? Victoria Nuland and her husband, Robert Kagan, the people that President Biden has appointed all around him, from Blinken to Sullivan and right down the line. They are basically urging people around the New American Century. They’re the people who said America can run the whole world and create its own reality. And yes, they know that this is going to cause enormous problems for Germany. They know that not only will it block the energy that Germany and Italy and other countries in Europe need through their oil and gas, but also it’ll block the use of gas for fertiliser, upping their fertiliser production and decreasing their food production. They look at this and they say, How can America gain from all of this? There’s always a way of gaining what something looks to be bad. Well, one way they’ll gain is oil prices are going way up. And that benefits the United States whose foreign policy is based very largely on oil and gas. The oil industry controls most of the world’s oil trade, and that explains a lot of the US diplomacy. This is a fight to lock the world energy trade into control by U.S. companies, excluding not only Iran and Venezuela, but also excluding Russia.
Ross [00:06:16] So as Europe pushes towards more and more green and renewable energy and this for the Americans they must think it’s a dreadful scenario insofar as they can’t sell the oil as Europe becomes or wants to become more self-sufficient. So ultimately, and Britain net zero, whatever that means. But but going down the renewables path, going down the solar path takes America’s dependency or dependency on America out the game, doesn’t it?
Michael Hudson [00:06:49] This is exactly the point that the European public has not realised. While most of the European public wants to prevent global warming and prevent carbon into the atmosphere, U.S. foreign policy is based on increasing, and even accelerating, global warming, accelerating carbon emissions because that’s the oil trade. Suppose that Europe got its way. Suppose if the Greens got what they wanted and Germany and Europe were completely dependent on solar energy panels, on wind energy and to some extent, on nuclear power, perhaps? Well, if they were completely self-sufficient in energy without oil or gas or coal, America would lose the primary lever. It has over the ability to turn off the power and electricity and oil of any country that didn’t follow U.S. diplomatic direction.
Ross [00:07:48] So when we take your analysis here and we think about how the sanctions are going to build capacity, push Russia and China together, when we start to look at sort of piggy in the middle, if you like the EU, when we’re thinking about America, the EU has had a sort of abusive relationship with the Americans for quite some time now, hasn’t it?
Michael Hudson [00:08:06] Well, that’s that’s true in the sense that EU foreign policy has basically been turned over to NATO. So instead of European voters and politicians making their policy, they’ve relinquished European foreign policy to NATO, which is really an arm of the US military. So yes, Europe has had a decent relationship with the United States diplomatically by saying yes, yes, please or yes, thank you by not being independent. Of course, if it were independent, the relationship would not be so friendly and decent.
Ross [00:08:46] So for countries that are net importers of food, need to keep the lights on, need heating and need cheap oil. How does this pan out? What does it look like for the UK? What does it look like for the EU?
Michael Hudson [00:08:59] Well, Vice President, Kamala Harris the other day said to Americans, Yes, life is going to be much more expensive. Our oil prices are going up and squeezing families. But think of the poor Ukrainian babies that we’re saving. So take it on the chin for the Ukrainian babies. So basically the United States is presenting horror stories of the Ukraine and saying, if you don’t willingly suffer now by isolating Russia, then Russia is going to roll over you with tanks just like it rolled over Central Europe after World War Two. I mean, it’s waving the flag of Russian aggression, as if Russia or any country in today’s world has an army that’s able to invade any other industrial nation. All military can do today of any country is bomb and kill other populations and industrial centres. No nation is able to occupy or rollover any industrial country. And the United States keeps trying to promote this mythology that we’re still in the world of 1945. And that world ended really with the Vietnam War when the military draft ended. And no country is able to have a military draft to raise the army with necessary to fight to invade. Russia can’t do it any more than Europe or the United States could do it. So all the United States can do is wave warnings about how awful Russia is and somehow convince Europe to follow the US position. But most of all, it doesn’t really have to. Europe doesn’t really have a voice, and this is what the complaint by Putin and Foreign Secretary Lavrov have been saying. They say that Europe is just following the United States and it doesn’t matter what the European people want or what European politicians want. The United States is so deeply in control that they really don’t have much of a choice.
Ross [00:11:15] When does the consumer start to feel this? When does the European or British consumer start to feel the pinch when these sanctions are enacted? And what does that look like?
Michael Hudson [00:11:25] Well, it depends on how fast the sanctions work. The United States said Well, in another year and a half, we’ll be able to provide Europe with liquefied natural gas. Well, the problem is, first of all, they’re not the ports to handle the liquefied natural gas to go into Europe. Secondly, there are not enough ships and tankers to carry all of this gas to Europe. So unless there are very warm winters, Europe is not going to have a very easy time for the next few years. And that’s only for oil and gas. It’s dependent on raw materials that Russia produces. For instance, palladium is necessary for catalytic converters. Titanium is necessary to make the screws that are especially used on aeroplanes that are strong enough not to buckle and break when winds go up and down and when they’re full. Russia even produces the neon and the crypton that are necessary for making some kind of electronic uses and also for many components that go into computers and information technology. There’s a whole range of exports that Europe is highly dependent on, and the United States has provided Putin with a whole list of these exports, saying, Well, OK, we’re going to fight against Europe buying your oil and gas but you can certainly sell us your heavy oil that we need since we’re not buying it from Venezuela. We certainly need the following list of critical materials that we need, like helium and crypton. These are our pressure points. Please don’t press on them. Well, you can imagine what Putin and his advisers are saying. Thank you for giving us this list of the pressure points that you’re exempting from the trade sanctions. I think if you really want a break in the unilateral, unipolar world, I think we should break now and see whether you really want to get along without trading.
Ross [00:13:51] Michael Hudson, welcome back, second half, Renegade Inc. Wonderful to have you. In that first half we followed the money, if you like. We talked about sanctions and the unintended consequences. I just want to pull back a little further if we can and just talk about the sort of tectonic shifts that are going on in the world. I spoke to somebody from Russia recently and what he said was very straightforward. He said, now what we have to do is begin to learn to live without the West. Do you think that that sentiment is proliferating across Russia now? Is that the mindset?
Michael Hudson [00:14:22] Well, if you read President Putin’s speeches, that’s exactly what’s happening. And Secretary Lavrov has voiced exactly the same feeling. There’s almost a disgust with the West and a feeling from Putin, Lavrov and the other Russian spokesmen, how could we everhave hoped to have an integration with Europe after 1991? Europe really was not on our side at all, and we didn’t realise that Europe is really part of the U.S. diplomatic sphere. It’s like all of Europe is now backing the attack on Russia. The best to do is reorient our economy towards China, Asia and Eurasia and become our own self-sufficient, independent centre
Ross [00:15:15] De-dollarisation and the amassing of plenty of gold by both the Russians and the Chinese. Just talk us through that.
Michael Hudson [00:15:21] Well, Ross, you asked in the first half of this interview how has American sanctions worked against it? I should have mentioned what you just mentioned, the dollar. The United States just grabbed all of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves, just as England a few months ago grabbed all of Venezuela’s gold that was held in the Bank of England when Venezuela tried to spend this gold on buying medical supplies to cope with the COVID virus. So basically, the United States have said, if any foreign country holds its reserves in the United States or accounts in U.S. banks. If a country in the global south tries to pay its foreign debt by holding its reserves in US banks in order to be the paying agent on the interest on its foreign debt. And if that foreign country does something we don’t like, like trade with Russia or permit more labour unionisation or try to become independent in food, we’re just going to do what we did to Venezuela, what we did to Iran when we grabbed its foreign exchange reserves or what we did to Russia. And that means that other countries all of a sudden see what they thought was their flight to security, what they thought was their most secure savings, their holdings in U.S. banks, US treasury bill, all of a sudden, is holding them hostage and is a high risk. Even the Financial Times of London has been writing about this, saying, how can the United States that was getting a free ride off the dollar standard for the last 50 years, ever since 1971, when foreign countries held dollars instead of gold and basically holding dollars means you buy U.S. Treasury bonds to finance the US budget deficit and the balance of payments deficit. How can the United States kill the goose that’s giving it the free ride? Well, the answer is that other countries can only move into gold and there’s an alternative to the dollar because that’s something that all the countries of the world have agreed upon is an asset, not a liability. If you hold any foreign currency, that currency is a liability of a foreign country, and if you hold gold, it’s a pure asset. There’s no country that can cancel it, the Americans can’t cancel Russia’s gold supply that’s held in Russia, although it can grab Russian gold supply if it were to hold it in the New York Federal Reserve Bank or the Bank of England. So other countries are not only moving to gold, Germany is bringing its gold back from New York, the Federal Reserve, in aeroplanes back to Germany, so it’ll have its own gold just in case German politicians would do something the United States didn’t like and the United States would simply grab Germany’s gold. The United States sanctions, and it’s especially it’s grabbing on foreign reserve, has started a war that is dividing the world between the West and Eurasia.
Ross [00:18:40] A technical part to all of this because let’s face it, it is an information war and it’s also an economic war. Is it the FIRE sector that you point out – the financial, insurance and real estate sector. Is it that they want to continue the exorbitant privilege of credit creation, because ultimately, if you think about gold, there’s no counterparty risk. Gold is gold and it has been for millennia. Far from being a barbarous relic, by the way now, people are starting to realise the intrinsic value, especially as crypto falls apart. Can you just talk a little bit about this, the FIRE sector wanting the exorbitant privilege of creating credit?
Michael Hudson [00:19:19] This is really what the new world division and global fracture is all about. You’re right, Ross. If you look at after World War One, the American fight against Soviet communism, was basically a fight of industrial capitalism against the threat of socialism. But after 1991, and especially in the last two decades, America deindustrialised. So the fight is not by industrial capitalism against countries pushing their labour up. It’s a fight of neoliberalism against industrial capitalism or socialism abroad. It’s against industrial capitalism evolving into socialism. It’s a belief that, well, now that America’s be industrialised, how is it going to control the world economy? Well, it’ll control it through a financial means by being the creditor and foreign countries debt payments to America will enable it to make its military payments abroad and finance its trade deficit. But also, America’s purchase of key natural resources will give it natural resources when its purchase of takeover of real estate is going to essentially make the United States the landlord class and monopoly class, that mediaeval Europe had to hold the rest of the population in serfdom. That basically is the American strategy of neoliberalism fighting against countries that reject privatisation and financialization of their economy, and specifically financialization under the control of U.S. banks, U.S. private capital and allied satellite banks and capital from England or France or Germany. This is exactly the fight. Will banking and finance control the world economy or will other countries try to build up their own economies through labour and tangible capital formation?
Ross [00:21:27] Where do you stand on that? And I’m only asking you to predict the future, Michael. How do you think this plays out? Because the way you’ve depicted it is the rent seekers, the neoliberal rent seekers on one hand, and there are value creators on the other. And by the way, those two things don’t sit very well together, as we know. How does that play out?
Michael Hudson [00:21:51] Even though the United States is the largest debtor economy in the world, it’s a creditor vis-a-vis the global south and other countries and it uses its creditor position to take over their natural resources, real estate, oil and gas, mineral rights and public utilities and natural monopolies and that are being privatised in government infrastructure. It’s becoming basically the landlord monopoly class of the entire world. That’s the U.S. strategy, and that’s the key to why the world is fracturing globally. And in the past, the global south countries were unable to fight against this tendency in the 70s and 80s with the Vendome conference on. But now that China and Russia threatened to be a self-sufficient core in Eurasia, this is the great threat to the American dream of becoming a landlord and financier of the world.
Ross [00:22:50] How do you think this pans out?
Michael Hudson [00:22:52] Well, the question is whether the United States is if we can control the world, who wants to live in a world like that, let’s blow it up. The question is whether the United States will actually go to war. The only lever that it has left is to drop bombs and to destroy and make the world look like Ukraine. So from the U.S. point of view, Europe’s future and Eurasia’s future is the Ukraine. Look at what we will do to you if you don’t follow our policy. America has just moved al Qaeda very heavily in the Ukraine to sort of repeat in Ukraine and Europe what it was doing in Syria and Libya. And the United States says this is what we can do. What are you going to do about it? Do you really want to fight. But the rest of the world, certainly China and Russia says, Well, we’re ready to fight. So there is no telling what you. And it comes down to personalities. Putin has said, well, do we really want to live in a world without Russia? If the United States is to attack us, we might as well end the world. The United States says, Do we really want to live in a world that we can’t control? If we’re not completely in control, we feel very insecure and we’re going to blow up the world. So you have this countervailing position in a world where all the arms control has been dismantled by the United States in the last few years. The United States has withdrawn from all of the agreements that Russia and China have tried to promote. And Europe is standing by and apparently is willing to be the sacrificial lamb in all of this as Ukraine is being the sacrificial lamb. So the United States and Russia say, let’s fight to the last European. And Russia initially didn’t want that because it was hoping that Europe and Russia would have a mutual gain in trade and investment relationships. But now it doesn’t feel that way. And there may be a proxy war between the United States over the European economy, not necessarily bombing Europe, but trade sanctions, energy sanctions, the kind of disruption that Europe is going to be seeing in the next year is if it loses Russian oil and gas and minerals and also, I think Chinese exports.
Ross [00:25:25] Is there a moment where cooler heads prevail and suddenly the West and other places realise that they’re dependent from a food security point of view, from an energy security point of view that we are dependent? And is there a moment at that point that you can thaw a frozen conflict by saying, actually, if we both meet, we just take a step toward each other, actually, we can do something in a collaborative way? Now I get what you’ve said throughout the rest of the programme, and I give this a percentage possibility of about three percent, but isn’t there a strategy to say, actually, we’ve had all the grandstanding, we’ve had all the brinksmanship, we should now sit around the table and try and work something out?
Michael Hudson [00:26:03] I don’t see any cooler heads in the United States. The surprising thing is that here it’s the right wing channel, the Republican Fox Channel, is the only channel that’s taking the anti-war stand and is saying we shouldn’t be at war in Ukraine. It’s the only channel that’s talking about here is how Russia sees the world. Do we really want to take a one sided perspective or do we want to see the actual dynamics at work? So it was the Republicans and the right wing that is now primarily against the NATO war in the Ukraine. The left wing seems to be all for it, but the left wing of the Democratic Party is in office and I don’t see any cooler heads in the Democratic Party at all. And I’ve known many of these people for many decades, and they are willing to go to war for a death. There are still back in the world of World War Two when the fight was against the Nazis and anti-Semitism. They’re still living in a kind of mythology world, not in the real world. And the thought that the world can come to an end either doesn’t have a reality to them or as Herman Cain said, Well, somebody is going to survive.
Ross [00:27:29] Michael Hudson always a pleasure, a great insight. And, you know, it’s just refreshing to hear. Thank you very much for your time.
Michael Hudson [00:27:38] Well, thank you very much for having me, Ross.
On February 21 Russia announced that it would recognize the Donbas republics. A day later it did so. The ‘west’ immediately announced sanctions which in fact had been prepared in advance. On February 24 Russian troops crossed the border into Ukraine.
The Russian ruble immediately took a big hit. It has since recovered a bit.
oday’s news will bring the ruble to a new heights.
Putin instructed to convert gas contracts with unfriendly countries into rublesPresident Vladimir Putin instructed to issue a directive to Gazprom to convert contracts into rubles for unfriendly countries. In his opinion, supplying Russian goods to the EU, the USA and receiving payment in dollars and euros "does not make any sense for us." Against this background, the ruble moved to growth on the Moscow Exchange.“Both the US and the EU have basically defaulted on their obligations to Russia. And now everyone in the world knows that obligations in dollars and euros may not be fulfilled. <...> It is quite obvious that in this regard, it makes no sense for us to supply our goods to both the EU and the USA and receive payment in dollars, euros and a number of other currencies. Therefore, I have decided to implement in the shortest possible time a set of measures to transfer payments for our natural gas supplied to unfriendly countries to Russian rubles,” Mr. Putin said at a meeting with the government.The President instructed the Central Bank and the government to determine within a week the order of operations for the purchase of rubles on the domestic market by buyers of Russian gas. He claims that Russia will continue to supply gas "in accordance with the volumes and according to the pricing principles concluded in the contracts."The dollar exchange rate on the Moscow Exchange fell below 100 rubles. for the first time since March 3rd. As of 15:37, the US currency is trading at 101.55 rubles. (-2 rubles). The euro exchange rate fell by 2.85 rubles to 111.65 rubles. The maximum dollar fell to 94.99 rubles, the euro - to 109.7 rubles.The European Union, the United States, Great Britain and a number of other countries have imposed sanctions against Russia in response to the military operation in Ukraine, which has been carried out since February 24 on the orders of Mr. Putin. One of the measures was the freezing of about half of the Central Bank's gold and foreign exchange reserves ($300 billion).
To pay in ruble one first has to buy rubles. With higher demand for rubles and no change in supplies the price for the Russian currency will go up. As Russia is selling hydrocarbons and other resources for billions of dollars per day the ruble is likely to soon reach record heights.
On February 28 another round of sanctions hit Russia. The part of the Russian central bank reserves that were stored in the ‘west’ were frozen. The central bank immediately pushed its interest rate from 9% to 20% to prevent a flight from the ruble. This helped to lessen the damage but made credit expensive and has hit the future growth potential in Russia.
But with a high new rubles demand from the outside of Russia the central bank will soon be able to lower its interest rate to more normal levels. Credit conditions will ease and investment in Russia, to replace products that had so far been imported, will rise again.
Today’s move to demand rubles for hydrocarbons is only on of the many steps Russia can, and likely will take, to retaliate for sanctions from the ‘west’.
All energy consumption in the U.S. and EU will now come at a premium price. This will push the EU and the U.S. into a recession. As Russia will increase the prices for exports of goods in which it has market power - gas, oil, wheat, potassium, titanium, aluminum, palladium, neon etc - the rise in inflation all around the world will become significant.
As he heads to Europe, President Biden will press U.S. allies to help impose even more aggressive sanctions on Russia.
Biden demands that Europe suicides itself while he is protecting the U.S. industry. I hope that some people in the European capitals are still able to think clear enough to recognize the racket the U.S. is trying to run here:
Together with the economic devastation that U.S. and European sanctions on Russia are causing in their own economies this will end in regime-changes in several European countries. The U.S. is of course again protecting itself from as much as it can at the cost of others.
The question remains, why did all those who for so long foretold this war do so little to stop it, and so much to hasten the disaster Russia has now set in motion?
Indeed. Why didn’t the government of Germany guarantee in writing that it would veto any additional NATO membership? It would have solved at least half of the problem. Why didn’t any other NATO government do so?
And what are they doing now? Where are their initiatives for peace?
Wake up. Otherwise this will end in disaster. Not for Russia but for the rest of Europe.
Kids and cats
Ah. This is funny. Poor kitties, but they know that the big stupid humans can’t be helped. video 124MB
NATO'S STOLTENBERG SAYS ANY USE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS WILL CHANGE NATURE OF CONFLICT, RUSSIA MUST UNDERSTAND THAT IT CAN NEVER WIN A NUCLEAR WAR.
UPDATE 5:10 PM EDT —
NATO Secretary-General Stoltenberg said that NATO has plans in place to protect all allies from nuclear threat, and that there should be no doubt about its readiness.
MORE:
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has warned of a “direct clash” between Moscow and NATO forces if peacekeepers from the military alliance are deployed to Ukraine.
Lavrov made the remarks on Wednesday while speaking to students and staff at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) in response to Polish proposals for a NATO and international “peace mission.”
“Our Polish colleagues have already stated that there will be a NATO summit now, we need to send peacekeepers. I hope they understand what is at stake,” Lavrov said, according to Russian state-owned news agency TASS.
STILL MORE:
Russian lawmaker Alexei Zhuravlyov on state TV threatens nuclear strike on Warsaw, Poland and NATO forces or any peacekeeping contingent that might try to enter Ukraine.
Hal Turner Editorial Opinion
This issue has been surfacing far too frequently of late, and there’s a very good reason for it: The West has attacked Russia economically over the Ukraine situation, and has done it so badly that Russia is in actual danger of collapsing as a country.
The West seems to think that Russia’s only option is to sit back and take the sanctions, or change its behavior with Ukraine to abide what NATO and the west wants.
The Russian’s don’t see it that way.
The West PROMISED Russia, after the fall of the Soviet Union, that they would “not move one inch eastward from the Re-unified East-West Germany” (1997). Yet NATO did precisely that in the ensuing years, to the point were NATO nations are now directly bordering Russia.
Those NATO nations have NATO troops rotating in and out of them. The West lies about it by saying they’re only there “temporarily” when in fact, as thousands leave after a few months duty, thousands more come to replace them. The result: An ever-present NATO conventional force.
Then too, there’s the missiles. US Missile Defense systems . . . now in several of the former Soviet Block nations, all aimed directly at Russia.
Ukraine was simply the latest Domino to fall in the long line of NATO expansion. The reason NATO wanted Ukraine has to do with its proximity to Moscow and to Russia’s Strategic Nuclear missile silos. If American missile defenses can be placed on Ukraine soil, they will have a flight time of only 5 minutes to Moscow, and less than ten minutes to Russia’s nuclear silos. Russia cannot defend against missiles that are so close and can travel so far and fast.
Worse, the technology of missiles has evolved and now, the very same “conventional” missiles claimed to be “defensive” can be re-fitted with OFFENSIVE NUCLEAR WARHEADS within an hour. And the re-fit can be done while the missiles remain in their launchers, so no one would know the missiles had been converted from conventional to nuclear.
These facts pose an existential threat to Russia, the very same way that Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba posed an existential threat to the USA under President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
What did Kennedy do? He told the Soviets either those missiles had to go, or . . . . the US would invade Cuba to destroy those missiles. (Gee, the exact same cause for invasion that is now seeing Russia inside Ukraine!)
Yet no one screeched to President Kennedy about Cuba being a sovereign country that could align itself however they liked. No one even questioned Kennedy’s decision that either those missiles go, or Cuba gets invaded. The reason no one questioned it is because every RATIONAL person knew Kennedy was right.
Well, guess what? Today, with the situation in Ukraine, Russian President Putin is . . . . right. He is doing in Ukraine what then-US-President Kennedy was preparing to do with Cuba. It’s no different.
NUKES
Russia knows – and has said publicly – that its conventional military forces cannot compete against the collective force of NATO. But Russia ALSO said (publicly) that they have the largest nuclear arsenal, and their hypersonic missile technology is far superior to all of NATO.
So the Russians, from the start, have made clear they fully understood what they were getting themselves into with Ukraine and the possibility of NATO involvement. Russia would be forced to use nukes. Period.
They knew this. They still know it.
NATO knows it too.
So why then, is NATO’s nitwit, Jens Stoltenberg saying today “ANY USE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS WILL CHANGE NATURE OF CONFLICT, RUSSIA MUST UNDERSTAND THAT IT CAN NEVER WIN A NUCLEAR WAR.” ?????
One possibility is that Stoltenberg knows that NATO has actual plans to get involved. The latest iteration of those plans is for NATO countries to “enter” Ukraine as a “Peace keeping force.” Russia has made it explicitly clear that if NATO tries such a move, Russia will engage NATO Troops in battle. War will be the result.
Period End.
And since it is already established that Russia cannot win against NATO conventional forces, Russia would have to “go nuclear.” Stoltenberg and the west think Russia wouldn’t dare.
Stoltenberg and the West are wrong.
Russia would.
They’ve said it publicly.
Several times.
The soyboys of the West think they can talk their way out of anything they do. This time, they cannot.
The message from Russia seems to me to be very simple: NATO cannot have Ukraine as a member. Period.
American missile defenses cannot be placed on the territory of former Soviet Block nations. Period.
If my assessment of this Russian Position is correct, then either NATO accepts that these facts are real and stops what it has been doing since 1997 by adding former Soviet Bloc Nations and withdraws NATO troops and missiles from those nations, or NATO refuses to take “no” for an answer, enters Ukraine, and it is World War 3, with nuclear weapons, VERY VERY SOON.
Those appear to me to be the facts.
That no mass-media outlets in the West are bothering to report them to the general public, will leave their citizens blissfully ignorant, until the bright, white, flashes start.
Thankfully, YOU are not being left blissfully ignorant. YOU have chosen to avail yourself of this web site and radio show and as such, YOU know what’s really going on. We are being marched directly into a (NUCLEAR) World War 3.
MAYOR OF KYIV: "WORLD WAR III HAS ALREADY BEGUN AND UKRAINE IS THE BEGINNING"
She is very, very fine. Really nice build and look at that fantastic smile! My goodness, I could just eat her up, I’ll tell you what! video 3MB
Dream griddle and alarm clock.
Wake up on the right side of bed!
Joe Biden Speech
Interesting stuff…
“We’re at an inflection point [in] not just the world economy [but] the world that occurs every three or four generations,” the president said.“[A general told me that] 60 million people died between 1900 and 1946 and since then we’ve established a liberal world order, and it hasn’t happened in a long while.”“Now is the time when things are shifting and there’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it. We’ve got to unite the rest of the free world in doing it.”
Here’s what Russia thinks…
Biden says US must lead ‘new world order’
The 46th president highlighted the role Washington would have among the “free” states.US President Joe Biden raised eyebrows on Monday after he claimed a “new world order” would soon be established and that it was up to the United States to lead it.
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During a speech at Business Roundtable’s CEO Quarterly Meeting, Biden claimed the world was at “an inflection point” which “occurs every three or four generations” and that it was up to the US to determine the outcome.
“As one of the top military people said to me in a security meeting the other day, 60 million people died between 1900 and 1946, and since then we’ve established a liberal world order and that hadn’t happened in a long while,” the president said.
The comment raised eyebrows in both the US and around the world and resulted in ‘New World Order’ becoming one of Twitter’s trending topics on Monday.
The term ‘new world order’ has historically been used to refer to an era of great global change and has been used by politicians such as former US President George H. W. Bush, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.
For decades, however, the phrase has also been the subject of a major conspiracy theory which alleges a secret, elitist plot to form an oppressive global government.
Politicians and government officials have previously received criticism for using the term – most recently Dr. Kerry Chant, the chief health officer of the Australian state of New South Wales.
“We will be looking at what contact tracing looks like in the new world order,” said Chant during a September Covid-19 press conference, prompting the term to trend on social media.
Journalists and other social media users criticized Chant for using the term, with former journalist Chris Urquhart writing that “government officials would be well advised to avoid phrases like ‘the new world order’ when they’re talking at press conferences about massive limitations on people’s freedoms.”
Some comments…
A Rufus has understanding
If you are not making the world a better place, you are contributing to it’s destruction. For God’s sake, be good, and kind. If you cannot. Then be neutral. But do not make others sad or hurtful. video 8MB
While the United States goes into hyper-inflation, China is stable
“They’re flying blind, and are too little, too late,” Steve Hanke says in disbelief, an Applied Economics professor of John Hopkins University. “It’s utter rubbish and nonsense” that Fed Chairman Jerome Powell sees supply chain issues as a root cause for inflation, he tells me, as we decipher the Federal Reserve’s latest official statements on the shape of the U.S. economy.“The money supply in excess causes inflation, and the Federal Reserve appears to be almost clueless,”
Hanke shares with me as we discuss last week’s conversation between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“Obviously the Chinese know this,” which is why their inflation rating is less than 1%, the former Senior Economist on President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers articulates to me.
Inflation is always destructive.
I can confirm that while prices have been rising inside of China, it is in no way resembling the kinds of inflation that is being seen in America, Europe or the rest of the West. The reason is simple. China has been managing the flow of USD for payments for decades. THis managment is intentional and it insulates China from inflationary effects of the USD due to poor management of debt by the United States.
United States Inflation Rate Annual inflation rate in the US accelerated to 7.9% in February of 2022, the highest since January of 1982, matching market expectations. Energy remained the biggest contributor (25.6% vs 27% in January), with gasoline prices surging 38% (40% in January).
What happens when your QR goes orange
Everyone must take regular swab tests, and be up to date on their injections. IF you are not, your status goes from green to orange. This video shows what happens when you try to go though a tollbooth with an orange QR code in China. video 3MB
I got this easy recipe from my daughter, who lives in France. It’s become my go-to fondue, and I make it often for our family.
—Betty A. Mangas, Toledo, Ohio
What are you waiting for?
Crib Dribbler.
Perfect for hot soups, milkshakes, and energy drinks.
Europe’s LARGEST Natural Gas Storage Facility: EMPTY
The largest natural gas storage facility in northern Europe is now EMPTY of gas.
The facility, run by (Russia’s) GAZPROM, dropped like a rock once Europe instituted economic sanctions against Russia.
With this largest facility now empty, industry will have to shut down for lack of fuel for heating and generation of electric.
With the largest storage facility now empty, the draw-down from all the smaller facilities will speed up by orders of magnitude, emptying them with ten days to two weeks.
What will Europe do when it has no gas to generate electric or to heat buildings?
Of course, all of this trouble has to do with Europe sticking its nose into the affairs of Russia-Ukraine.
Now that Europe is demonstrably running out of natural gas, watch for things between Russia-Ukraine-NATO to get VERY VERY VERY much worse, very fast.
My savvy grandmother whipped up recipes like this homey cinnamon-scented apple pudding in the Depression years. Many of us still make them today.
—Holly Sharp, Warren, Ontario
China is FAST
So President Biden thinks that it will be easy to compete against China. Americans think that it will be no problem, because America is exceptional, and great? This echo chamber in the Untied States that gives this illustion that China is dark, dingy, dirty and backwards, while America is so wonderful is a lie. It amazes me. Becuase this is what China is like… video 21MB
Chinese weddings
The Chinese have heart. Real, honest to goodness heart. video 22MB
China rebukes US as ‘world’s biggest human rights violator’
Beijing has promised “countermeasures” if Washington doesn’t revoke sanctions over Uyghurs
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Beijing has promised to respond in kind unless the US revokes the blacklisting of Chinese officials it said were guilty of human rights violations.
Speaking at a regular press conference on Tuesday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin accused the US of “smearing China, oppressing Chinese officials for no reason, violating international law… and grossly interfering in China’s domestic affairs.”
Wang said Beijing will respond with “reciprocal countermeasures” if the US does not immediately revoke its sanctions.
The statement came after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused the Chinese government of committing “genocide and crimes against humanity” against the Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic minority living predominately in China’s northwestern Xinjiang Region. He added that Washington has blacklisted Chinese officials who it said were guilty of human rights violations.
Wang responded in kind, calling the US “the biggest human rights violator in the world,” whose historical treatment of Native Americans “constitutes de facto genocide.” He also criticized Washington for the “long-lasting systemic racial discrimination” of black Americans.
Multiple global human rights groups have long accused China of oppressing the Uyghurs and forcing them to work in labor camps. Beijing has denied the allegations, insisting that the Uyghurs are studying in vocational education and training centers as part of state integration and deradicalization programs.
My friends and I have been getting together for "ladies lunches" for years. These vol-au-vents are the perfect no-fuss fancy food; they look complicated, but are actually simple and fun to make. Whenever I think of good friends and good company, I think of these savory pastries.
—Shauna Havey, Roy, Utah
China can build
OMG! It’s insane how fast and efficiently that China can build things. You all just wait and see what happens when China and Russia build their Moon and Mars cities. video 23MB
A 737 crashed in China.
A Boeing 737 carrying 132 people crashed early Monday in China. Although Boeing’s 737 has faced extraordinarily high-profile safety concerns over the past three years, the plane that crashed Monday was a different version of the aircraft than the embattled 737 Max that shook Boeing to its core.
The cause of Monday’s crash has yet to be determined. The plane had been in service since 2015. The flight, operated by China Eastern Airlines, was flying from the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming to Guangzhou when it crashed.
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It’s crash profile; being a full-throttle nose-dive directly to the ground is highly unusual.
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Evidence suggests any of the following;
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Intentional Pilot (and co-pilot) action to destroy the plane.
Software override of the pilot commands.
Remote operation of the software to override the pilot.
The manufacturer of the aircraft has had problems with the software. Other crashes of similiar planes has been the result of software overrides of the pilot.
We do not know (as of yet) the real cause for this crash. But one thing seems clear, somehow the plane overrode the directions of the pilot. It put the plane in a nose dive straight towards the ground and set the engines on full-throttle, full speed, as it plunged towards the ground.
Why it did so, is unknown.
Yet, the United States government black operations regarding taking control of the software should NOT be ruled out.
This reminds me of HAL in the 1969 movie; “2001; A Space odyssey”.
2001 A Space odyssey
So, Boeing makes aircraft that can override the pilot. Brilliant! Why do you need pilots? How about having full robotic planes?
Maybe it’s because no one will fly in them.
…
Isn’t technology wonderful. Remember when fully automatic self-driving cars were crashing left and right? Yeah, I do. Well, somehow Boeing things that this would be a good thing to implement in passenger planes. Who would doubt it?
Anyways, I have to ask the moronic question of the day…
"Well, with fully robotic planes, then why still have pilots, when the airplane can override the pilot?"
Well, perhaps its because you keep the illusion of human control, when the truth is that the software is in full control…
… as well as the “authorized” owner of that software who can control the plane and tell it to do whatever he/it wants. Like the United States. Hum?
Let’s talk about HAL. Specifically what it did.
HAL
From the 1969 movie…
HAL is a computer system. And it is built into the Discovery One spacecraft, and is in charge of maintaining all mechanical and life support systems on board.
HAL also has several “eyes” placed periodically around the spacecraft.
About three weeks into the flight, Hal picks up a fault in the AE-35 unit, the system responsible for keeping the satellite dish antenna aligned with the Earth, and states that it will go one-hundred percent failure within 72 hours.
He suggests that they go EVA and replace the faulty unit with a new one.
Dr. David Bowman goes out and retrieves the unit. But when he brings it back and runs it through diagnostics, they can find no problem with the AE-35.
They radio Mission Control about the problem, and Mission Control says that Hal is in error predicting the fault.
This is a bit of a surprise, as the 9000 series has a perfect operational record.
Noting that this kind of thing has always been because of human error when it has occurred before, Hal suggests that they go out and “replace the malfunctioning unit and allow it to fail.
Then it should be a simple matter to track down the problem.”
But by this time, both Dr. Frank Poole and Bowman are becoming suspicious of Hal’s behaviour. They climb into one of the EVA pods, out of earshot of Hal. Poole states that he has “a bad feeling about him”. Bowman and Poole suggest disconnecting Hal if he is wrong about predicting the fault.
Unbeknownst to them, Hal read their lips through the window of the spacepod.
Translating their lip motions, Hal learns of their plans for his disconnection; according to Clarke, “he (will) be deprived of all his inputs, and thrown into an unimaginable state of unconsciousness. To Hal, this (is) the equivalent of death. For he (has) never slept, and therefore he (does) not know that one (can) wake again.”
Poole goes out to replace the supposedly malfunctioning AE-35 unit.
As he drifts through space to the satellite dish, Hal takes control of the pod and rams it into Poole, disconnecting his oxygen hose and venting the air in his suit, killing him.
Bowman, obviously distraught by the loss of his friend, goes out to retrieve Poole’s body.
However, while Bowman is out on his excursion, Hal shuts off the life support systems on the three astronauts in hibernation, which kills them all.
After Bowman returns to the Discovery I, Hal denies him reentry into the pod bay. So Bowman has to maneuver the pod over to the emergency airlock. Unfortunately, in his haste to retrieve his friend, Bowman had not bothered to don the helmet of his life-support suit because he had not believed he would need it, making it very difficult to enter the emergency airlock, as he would have to travel through the vacuum of space in order to do so.
This, however, does not stop Bowman.
Risking the hazards of explosive decompression, he eventually gets inside, grabs a space helmet, and goes to Hal’s logic memory center to erase his memory.
There he pulls out the memory tablets that control Hal’s higher functions.
As his memory degrades, Hal begins to give off information programmed very early in his life, such as the date he became operational. When all his logic is gone, he begins to sing the song “Daisy Bell.”
His final act of consciousness is to play a briefing that Dr. Heywood R. Floyd pre-recorded about the Tycho Monolith before their departure, and the real purpose of the Discovery One’s mission. As well that the insane idea that the owner / designers of HAL programmed it to lie.
Now…
Please consider that any systems; any devices; any mechanisms designed by man should NEVER have the capability to override human input.
This is well descried by the move, with the HAL computer system, and it seriously seems to be the case with all these Boeing aircraft crashes.
I can POSITIVELY tell you that one singular event resulting is one singular death would ABSOLUTELY stop the adoption of that system in other industires. It doesn’t matter what industry it is. Ceiling fans. Clothes irons. Motorcycles. Chainsaws. Rifles. One fatality, and the system is gone and will NEVER be revisited.
But somehow these systems in airplanes and automobiles are exceptions. At least in American products.
One cannot help thinking, especially if you ARE an American, that the United States is involved and WANTS the ability of the software to override the driver / pilot in the vehicle.
If you accept that notion…
…then many of the software related “accidents” of planes and automobiles with these systems are used as mechanisms of control by the United States “leadership”.
…
Remember boys and girls…
… REAL secrets are secret.
Every evidence is that this is exactly what is happening. While there might be some debate on the nuiances of implementation, the technologies and the systems involved, one thing is unmistakable…
The seriously ODD behaviors of the United States government is best explained by this exact senario.
…
Think about it.
Break.
Animal death and spirits visiting
All this talk about plunging planes, nuclear weapons, bio-weapons and everything all initiated by the Untied States government is disturbing to me. They obviously have never experienced sorry and grief.
Here are some really great examples of how much fun you can have with your cat friends. video 100MB
Amazing Cats
Cats areally are amazing. Just some great cat adventures. They are truly very special creatures. video 16MB
Happy times
Treasure the times that you have. Make them happy and share them with your friends. Cat love video 18MB
We all need each other now
Now, more than any other time in our lives, we need others. Make friends. SHare your time. Appreciate what you have. Make your life a good one. Be a Rufus. Show friendship. Show love. Show care. video 90MB
Be the Rufus
Take part in society. Stop being a spectator, and stop thinking that everything is someone else’s problem. The future depends on YOU. Take an active role in it. In every way, every day. Be the best you can be and help others. make the world a better place to live in. I believe in your. video 11MB
Make those around you smile
You will bring happiness to your environment. Smile. Say good things. Even if they are lies. Make your environment better. It’s quantum physics 101. video 120MB
Conclusions
I cannot say that one thing or the other is happening, and the causes and reasons for them. Later, I will ask the Domain Commander for some insight. However, right now, I know nothing.
Sure there might be all sorts of reasons for the observed behaviors, the strange actions by the USA and the West, and all the craziness. There’s really no way to really know the actual causes. So don’t worry about it. And believe me, as much as I want to know, the fact is, I don’t NEED to know.
I don’t know anything about chem-trails, nano-bots, or anything like that. I do know that everyone in the United States and the West are acting really, really weird. It’s like they are all having some kind of mass insanity.
After 30 years of glue sniffing euphoria, the US is now crashing.
And when it realizes it is cutting off its limbs to keep its jaundiced organs alive, it will have to make major, and costly, changes in living arrangements.
Mass transit in lieu of suburban sprawl. No more bloated military. A return to local industry and farming. Far more labor intensive cooperatives that actually do things and make stuff. Regional cultural and quasi-sufficiency. The end to industrial entertainment and woke academia. A resurgence of a proletariat based religion of hard work and respect. A return to classical literature and art.
Oh, how to pay for it all on NO budget?
America is in shambles, but the leadership doesn’t realize it yet. It’s like a family living off maxed-out credit, the family is stunned then the credit cards no longer work at the register.
That’s where the USA, and the EU are at right now.
Oh, they still have their shopping list, and two shopping carts filled with expensive steaks, groceries and all sorts of pricy items. But the cashier is there looking impatient, stamping her foot, and ready to call her manager. Oh, you have to pay in cash. She says.
Soon, very soon, the situation will accelerate to something bad.
It’s just really, really fucked up.
FUTURE
Evidence strongly suggests that the remote viewing of the 2025 by the Deagal Report is correct. It also validates the theory of Generational Turnings and the rise and fall of nations.
You will see many more strange things occur in the future.
We are not anywhere near the peak inflection point. But it is moving forward and I hope to be out of it’s way. I hope you all are as well.
BASIC PREP
Hyper-inflation is starting to hit the West. Be prudent.
Make sure that you have a garden, and a larder with lots of basics. Rice. Flour. Canned goods. Powdered milk.
Remember that one Burger King extra value meal is the same price as a massive bag of rice. Remember that one Starbucks coffee is the same prices as a massive bag of flour; and make sure that you have the tools to strain out the flour.
Learn to fish.
Own a bicycle, and use it. If you use it to ride to work one day a week, you will cut your commute expenses by 20%.
Have a solar panel to charge your phone with.
ADVANCED PREP
Have a good supply of your medicines, and lots of antibiodics. Set up a medical kit. Tell your doctor that you are equipping a sailboat for a long sea cruse, and give him a list of medicines for the first aid box. Get the prescriptions and fill it out.
It’s never too late to start. Do not plan on trying to go to the woods and forests. Those places will be crowded with the unprepaired. Your best solution is to “bug out in place”. Be mobile within your well-established community.
If you think that you can survive being alone, I’ve got news for you; that’s a fiction. Survivors are those that band together into groups. There’s strength in community. Read your history.
FUNDAMENTALS
For God’s sakes, turn off that bullshit “news”. It’s all screeching lies.
Have a skill, asset, ability, or feature that you can provide to your community that is beneficial to the community.
If you don’t have one. Get one. Learn, make, create or establish. Volunteer. Network locally.
Handiman skills.
Welding, plumbing, machining, autorepair.
Medical.
Farming, fishing, harvesting, growing.
It doesn’t mean that you will need to endure a post-nuclear fiasco. But in whatever changes that might hit your own individual communities, you will have the skills, networking and abilites to make you locally valuable.
Don’t believe me?
Ask PL. He’s doing this, and is very busy. Maybe too busy for MM here, but it’s the future. Participate. Make a difference. Smile. Socialize. stick to the fundamental basics.
Don’t get caught up in what you cannot change. It’s stressful, don’t you know.
Don’t get all wrapped up in the causes or the reasons, or the people behind the curtains. They won’t be revealed until the history books are written.
Be kind, calm and adaptable. Do your verbal affirmations. Be the Rufus. I beleive in you all.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
When I was a boy, my father bought me this used hard-cover book.
I was in the bedroom, playing around. He came home from work, and handed me the book. Stuck around a while, and then back downstairs. I way a young boy. Maybe eleven years old.
I loved the illustrations in it. They were well done, beautiful, really. I treasured that book. And I kept it with me for years and years until I was “retired”, and my belongings sold by my “friends” and “family” for what ever profit they could derive from our relationship.
Later, as I got older, I realized what I once had. Sigh.
It’s called life.
Today, we will visit the beautiful illustrations of pirates and buccaneers that so colored my childhood with adventure, treasure and high piracy on the seven seas.
Pyle created images which made the public buy a magazine or a book for its cover alone.
Vincent Van Gogh admitted to his brother Theo, he was struck “dumb with admiration” when he saw Howard Pyle’s illustrations in a magazine. Pyle (1853-1911) was the top American illustrator circa 1880-1910. His work made top moolah pulling in five times the going rate or $75 for a double-page spread in Harper’s Bizarre, 1878.
Pyle created images which made the public buy a magazine or a book for its cover alone. In modern parlance: his work was cinematic, powerful, and dramatic. If he’d been born a few decades later, Pyle may have been a film director. He used strange angles to look down on battle scenes or cast figures centre frame while mayhem occurred all around. He sketched deserted figures in a landscape which explained the whole narrative in a single frame.
When I, as a boy of perhaps 11 or 12 was given the Book of Pirates by my father, I was enthralled.
The book was a collection of popular pirate stories, which mostly centered around brave non-pirates who crossed paths with an infamous pirate and yet who lived to tell the tale.
Sure, they were very romanticized stories focusing on the more adventurous side of piracy than the true aspect of it (though the sacking and slaughter of entire towns is mentioned, just not in gory detail). But for me, as a young boy, I found it all to be an enjoyable, quick read.
Pyle was born in Wilmington, Delaware. His parents early recognised his prodigious talent for drawing and painting. They encouraged him to focus on developing this talent. He was lucky he got sent to a private school which fostered his genius.
When he first moved to New York to become a magazine illustrator, he had no idea how to sell himself. He needn’t have worried.
One glance by the editor of Pyle’s artistry pulled in commissions.
He was soon illustrating books like the The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood which created the imagery we are all familiar with today. Or books about knights in shining armour like Men of Iron and Otto of the Silver Hand.
Publishers would hire Pyle knowing no matter how trashy the novel, Pyle’s artwork would make it a hit.
In the 1890s, Pyle, by then married with seven kids, was asked to teach drawing at university.
This led him to set up the Howard Pyle School of Illustration Art in 1900. His school launched a whole new generation of artists who shaped the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.
As a young boy, when I read the book, what really stood out were the absolutely stunning and beautiful illustrations throughout the book. Looking at them, you could smell the rum, fish and cannon powder and hear the ocean and gun shots.
Every book, magazine, and Hollywood film used Pyle’s illustrations of pirates to dress Errol Flynn as Captain Blood or Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow.
What is not well know, however, is that once he mastered his work, he turned to teaching others in his technique.
Howard Pyle was an instructor at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry (now Drexel University) from 1894-1900, and in that time, he taught a generation of celebrated illustrators including, Maxfield Parrish, Jessie Wilcox Smith, Elizabeth Shippen Green, Frank E. Schoonover, and Violet Oakley.
More than 20 oil paintings will hang in the Paul Peck Gallery, including Howard Pyle’s “Here, Andre! A Spy! (1897)” on display with a variety of works on paper, as well as accompanying artifacts.
A majority of the exhibit will be presented in the Paul Peck Alumni Center, which is a historic Frank Furness designed building itself.
Some of the featured original paintings and drawings decorated American homes during their time period — also gracing the covers of publications such as Ladies’ Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post.
“A.J. Drexel founded the Drexel Institute in 1891, and when he died, he made it clear that his vision should be accessible to men and women from all backgrounds, which was unique for a college of that time period,” said Paula Marantz Cohen, Pennoni Honors College dean.
“Pyle’s time at Drexel undoubtedly shaped the field of American Illustration. He was an early parallel advocate of Drexel’s philosophy of ‘learning by doing’ encouraging his students to go out into the world to study their subject matter, an approach reflected in Drexel’s present-day Co-op program.
Not long after Drexel’s founding, Philadelphia’s publishing industry took off — greatly influencing Pyle’s artistic philosophy.
Pyle honored Drexel’s mission of experiential, democratic learning. His influences greatly contributed to illustrative painting and drawing becoming one of the truest forms of applied art.
He taught his students to be practical and commercially focused by observing reality first-hand.
“Today everyone knows the name Norman Rockwell but few people know the name Howard Pyle, let alone his art or his impact on generations of artists and American illustration,” says Judy Goffman Cutler, co-founder of the National Museum of American Illustration.
After his death from Bright’s disease in 1911, a giant compilation of Pyle’s illustrations of swashbuckling buccaneers was published under the title Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates.
It became a go-to-book for Hollywood costumiers and pulp fiction illustrators when conjuring up those daring pirates of the seven seas.
The book that I dedicate this entire article towards is a formula for (almost) every piece of swashbuckling fiction, namely scarred pirate captains, roguish and witty surogates, forced romance and the triumph of the just and lawful citizen whose virtue is rewarded with oh-so-fairly-gained and definitely-not-tainted-by-piracy wealth.
It’s perfect fodder for the young boy in all of us, and yes, you girls too.
Many pirates were women. And I hear that many of them were absolutely ruthless.
I lament that I lost the book to someone who found more pleasure in getting the fifty cents from a used book store from it, than any real value. To others, I suppose it’s just an item to profit from. Not one that held value. For me, the greatest pleasures of this book are the occasional descriptions that place you on a ship or an island, where you can briefly feel yourself bobbing over the swells or smell the brine.
The illustrations in the book are phenomenal, and it reads like you are at the bar or a pub during a rainy day and your friend is recounting a story his grandfather once told him.
Here’s an excerpt from the book…
Then the pirates marched into the town, and what followed may be conceived. It was a holocaust of lust, of passion, and of blood such as even the Spanish West Indies had never seen before. Houses and churches were sacked until nothing was left but the bare walls; men and women were tortured to compel them to disclose where more treasure lay hidden.Then, having wrenched all that they could from Maracaibo, they entered the lake and descended upon Gibraltar, where the rest of the panic-stricken inhabitants were huddled together in a blind terror.
I will admit that the writing style is old and not easy for all of us used to contemporaneous feeds.
After him came one Mansvelt, a buccaneer of lesser note, who first made a descent upon the isle of Saint Catharine, now Old Providence, which he took, and, with this as a base, made an unsuccessful descent upon Neuva Granada and Cartagena. His name might not have been handed down to us along with others of greater fame had he not been the master of that most apt of pupils, the great Captain Henry Morgan, most famous of all the buccaneers, one time governor of Jamaica, and knighted by King Charles II.
But for a young boy of eleven the stories were rich and ripe of adventure…
The attack of the castle and the defense of it were equally fierce, bloody, and desperate. Again and again the buccaneers assaulted, and again and again they were beaten back. So the morning came, and it seemed as though the pirates had been baffled this time. But just at this juncture the thatch of palm leaves on the roofs of some of the buildings inside the fortifications took fire, a conflagration followed, which caused the explosion of one of the magazines, and in the paralysis of terror that followed, the pirates forced their way into the fortifications, and the castle was won. Most of the Spaniards flung themselves from the castle walls into the river or upon the rocks beneath, preferring death to capture and possible torture; many who were left were put to the sword, and some few were spared and held as prisoners.
With the text and the illustrations, as well as the swash-buckling battles, it was a great escapist adventure for me to live out my boyhood dreams.
As for the bulls, as many of them as were shot served as food there and then for the half-famished pirates, for the buccaneers were never more at home than in the slaughter of cattle.
Then they marched toward the city. Three hours' more fighting and they were in the streets, howling, yelling, plundering, gorging, dram-drinking, and giving full vent to all the vile and nameless lusts that burned in their hearts like a hell of fire. And now followed the usual sequence of events—rapine, cruelty, and extortion; only this time there was no town to ransom, for Morgan had given orders that it should be destroyed. The torch was set to it, and Panama, one of the greatest cities in the New World, was swept from the face of the earth. Why the deed was done, no man but Morgan could tell. Perhaps it was that all the secret hiding places for treasure might be brought to light; but whatever the reason was, it lay hidden in the breast of the great buccaneer himself. For three weeks Morgan and his men abode in this dreadful place; and they marched away with one hundred and seventy-five beasts of burden loaded with treasures of gold and silver and jewels, besides great quantities of merchandise, and six hundred prisoners held for ransom.
Whatever became of all that vast wealth, and what it amounted to, no man but Morgan ever knew, for when a division was made it was found that there was only two hundred pieces of eight to each man.
The rest of them sailed away to the East Indies, to try their fortunes in those waters, for our Captain Avary was of a high spirit, and had no mind to fritter away his time in the West Indies, squeezed dry by buccaneer Morgan and others of lesser note. No, he would make a bold stroke for it at once, and make or lose at a single cast.
On his way he picked up a couple of like kind with himself—two sloops off Madagascar. With these he sailed away to the coast of India, and for a time his name was lost in the obscurity of uncertain history. But only for a time, for suddenly it flamed out in a blaze of glory. It was reported that a vessel belonging to the Great Mogul, laden with treasure and bearing the monarch's own daughter upon a holy pilgrimage to Mecca (they being Mohammedans), had fallen in with the pirates, and after a short resistance had been surrendered, with the damsel, her court, and all the diamonds, pearls, silk, silver, and gold aboard. It was rumored that the Great Mogul, raging at the insult offered to him through his own flesh and blood, had threatened to wipe out of existence the few English settlements scattered along the coast; whereat the honorable East India Company was in a pretty state of fuss and feathers. Rumor, growing with the telling, has it that Avary is going to marry the Indian princess, willy-nilly, and will turn rajah, and eschew piracy as indecent. As for the treasure itself, there was no end to the extent to which it grew as it passed from mouth to mouth.
And now Blackbeard, following the plan adopted by so many others of his kind, began to cudgel his brains for means to cheat his fellows out of their share of the booty.
At Topsail Inlet he ran his own vessel aground, as though by accident. Hands, the captain of one of the consorts, pretending to come to his assistance, also grounded his sloop. Nothing now remained but for those who were able to get away in the other craft, which was all that was now left of the little fleet. This did Blackbeard with some forty of his favorites. The rest of the pirates were left on the sand spit to await the return of their companions—which never happened.
As for Blackbeard and those who were with him, they were that much richer, for there were so many the fewer pockets to fill. But even yet there were too many to share the booty, in Blackbeard's opinion, and so he marooned a parcel more of them—some eighteen or twenty—upon a naked sand bank, from which they were afterward mercifully rescued by another freebooter who chanced that way—a certain Major Stede Bonnet, of whom more will presently be said. About that time a royal proclamation had been issued offering pardon to all pirates in arms who would surrender to the king's authority before a given date. So up goes Master Blackbeard to the Governor of North Carolina and makes his neck safe by surrendering to the proclamation—albeit he kept tight clutch upon what he had already gained.
It was a glorious thing for our captain, for here were thirteen Yankee crafts at one and the same time. So he took what he wanted, and then sailed away, and it was many a day before Marblehead forgot that visit.
Some time after this he and his consort fell foul of an English sloop of war, the Greyhound, whereby they were so roughly handled that Low was glad enough to slip away, leaving his consort and her crew behind him, as a sop to the powers of law and order. And lucky for them if no worse fate awaited them than to walk the dreadful plank with a bandage around the blinded eyes and a rope around the elbows. So the consort was taken, and the crew tried and hanged in chains, and Low sailed off in as pretty a bit of rage as ever a pirate fell into.
The end of this worthy is lost in the fogs of the past: some say that he died of a yellow fever down in New Orleans; it was not at the end of a hempen cord, more's the pity.
The cheat was kept up until the fruit of mischief was ripe for the picking; then, when the governor and the guards of the castle were lulled into entire security, and when Davis's band was scattered about wherever each man could do the most good, it was out pistol, up cutlass, and death if a finger moved. They tied the soldiers back to back, and the governor to his own armchair, and then rifled wherever it pleased them. After that they sailed away, and though they had not made the fortune they had hoped to glean, it was a good snug round sum that they shared among them.
Their courage growing high with success, they determined to attempt the island of Del Principe—a prosperous Portuguese settlement on the coast. The plan for taking the place was cleverly laid, and would have succeeded, only that a Portuguese negro among the pirate crew turned traitor and carried the news ashore to the governor of the fort. Accordingly, the next day, when Captain Davis came ashore, he found there a good strong guard drawn up as though to honor his coming. But after he and those with him were fairly out of their boat, and well away from the water side, there was a sudden rattle of musketry, a cloud of smoke, and a dull groan or two. Only one man ran out from under that pungent cloud, jumped into the boat, and rowed away; and when it lifted, there lay Captain Davis and his companions all of a heap, like a pile of old clothes.
Capt. Bartholomew Roberts was the particular and especial pupil of Davis, and when that worthy met his death so suddenly and so unexpectedly in the unfortunate manner above narrated, he was chosen unanimously as the captain of the fleet, and he was a worthy pupil of a worthy master. Many were the poor fluttering merchant ducks that this sea hawk swooped upon and struck; and cleanly and cleverly were they plucked before his savage clutch loosened its hold upon them.
Not a word was spoken after they had thus left the shore, and presently they might all have been ghosts, for the silence of the party. Barnaby True was too full of his own thoughts to talk—and serious enough thoughts they were by this time, with crimps to trepan a man at every turn, and press gangs to carry a man off so that he might never be heard of again. As for the others, they did not seem to choose to say anything now that they had him fairly embarked upon their enterprise.
And so the crew pulled on in perfect silence for the best part of an hour, the leader of the expedition directing the course of the boat straight across the harbor, as though toward the mouth of the Rio Cobra River. Indeed, this was their destination, as Barnaby could after a while see, by the low point of land with a great long row of coconut palms upon it (the appearance of which he knew very well), which by and by began to loom up out of the milky dimness of the moonlight. As they approached the river they found the tide was running strong out of it, so that some distance away from the stream it gurgled and rippled alongside the boat as the crew of black men pulled strongly against it. Thus they came up under what was either a point of land or an islet covered with a thick growth of mangrove trees. But still no one spoke a single word as to their destination, or what was the business they had in hand.
The night, now that they were close to the shore, was loud with the noise of running tide-water, and the air was heavy with the smell of mud and marsh, and over all the whiteness of the moonlight, with a few stars pricking out here and there in the sky; and all so strange and silent and mysterious that Barnaby could not divest himself of the feeling that it was all a dream.
So, the rowers bending to the oars, the boat came slowly around from under the clump of mangrove bushes and out into the open water again.
There he lay for I know not how long, staring into the darkness, until by and by, in spite of his suffering and his despair, he dozed off into a loose sleep, that was more like waking than sleep, being possessed continually by the most vivid and distasteful dreams, from which he would awaken only to doze off and to dream again.
It was from the midst of one of these extravagant dreams that he was suddenly aroused by the noise of a pistol shot, and then the noise of another and another, and then a great bump and a grinding jar, and then the sound of many footsteps running across the deck and down into the great cabin. Then came a tremendous uproar of voices in the great cabin, the struggling as of men's bodies being tossed about, striking violently against the partitions and bulkheads. At the same instant arose a screaming of women's voices, and one voice, and that Sir John Malyoe's, crying out as in the greatest extremity: "You villains! You damned villains!" and with the sudden detonation of a pistol fired into the close space of the great cabin.
Barnaby was out in the middle of his cabin in a moment, and taking only time enough to snatch down one of the pistols that hung at the head of his berth, flung out into the great cabin, to find it as black as night, the lantern slung there having been either blown out or dashed out into darkness. The prodigiously dark space was full of uproar, the hubbub and confusion pierced through and through by that keen sound of women's voices screaming, one in the cabin and the other in the stateroom beyond. Almost immediately Barnaby pitched headlong over two or three struggling men scuffling together upon the deck, falling with a great clatter and the loss of his pistol, which, however, he regained almost immediately.
What all the uproar meant he could not tell, but he presently heard Captain Manly's voice from somewhere suddenly calling out, "You bloody pirate, would you choke me to death?" wherewith some notion of what had happened came to him like a flash, and that they had been attacked in the night by pirates.
The vessel in which they sailed was a brigantine of good size and build, but manned by a considerable crew, the most strange and outlandish in their appearance that Barnaby had ever beheld—some white, some yellow, some black, and all tricked out with gay colors, and gold earrings in their ears, and some with great long mustachios, and others with handkerchiefs tied around their heads, and all talking a language together of which Barnaby True could understand not a single word, but which might have been Portuguese from one or two phrases he caught. Nor did this strange, mysterious crew, of God knows what sort of men, seem to pay any attention whatever to Barnaby or to the young lady. They might now and then have looked at him and her out of the corners of their yellow eyes, but that was all; otherwise they were indeed like the creatures of a nightmare dream. Only he who was the captain of this outlandish crew would maybe speak to Barnaby a few words as to the weather or what not when he would come down into the saloon to mix a glass of grog or to light a pipe of tobacco, and then to go on deck again about his business. Otherwise our hero and the young lady were left to themselves, to do as they pleased, with no one to interfere with them.
As for her, she at no time showed any great sign of terror or of fear, only for a little while was singularly numb and quiet, as though dazed with what had happened to her. Indeed, methinks that wild beast, her grandfather, had so crushed her spirit by his tyranny and his violence that nothing that happened to her might seem sharp and keen, as it does to others of an ordinary sort.
Do you want to read the book for free?
Well you can.
Complete with illustrations. Just simply click on the button here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
All of these Earth-shattering events have really eaten up my time and had to; and forced me, to put important articles / posts on the “back-burner”. Here, in this article, we are going to explore the beauty of art. Oh, don’t give me that look. Art is wonderful and stupendous. And I happen to treasure it.
I hope you enjoy this article as much as I enjoyed putting it together.
South Korea is full of talented artists, and Myeong-Minho is one of them. This man is slowly but surely taking over the hearts of people all over the internet with his beautiful drawings. And after looking at them, you might feel the beauty of falling in love yourself.
Myeong-Minho draws cozy, intimate daily moments of a cute couple’s lives – from cooking, napping together, to travel.
The cat that can be seen in most of Myeong drawing ideas is inspired by his real-life cat Dorim.
But the art is about family.
And it is about relationships.
It is about feelings.
And it is about community.
“Dorim has a lot of charm and playfulness like a puppy,” illustrator wrote on his Instagram.
“He is really cute and pretty, except for his hand and claws.”
Myeong-Minho adopted the kitten when in the early fall of 2016, a woman came to him when he was drawing near The Dorimcheon river and asked him to hold the cat for a few minutes but then disappeared.
And so the kitten left in the artist’s hands.
Myeong-Minho is an amazing illustrator whose warm and cute drawings are worth the praise and recognition, so take a look at some of his creations below.
And so let me present this…
And this…
And so let me present this…
And this…
And so let me present this…
This too…
And so let me present this…
And this…
Yes. So many beautiful prints.
Ah, it’s only the “tip of the iceberg”.
Here’s one about COVID…
So many drawings to select from.
This is only a small sampling.
Imagine these prints all over your home…
Looks like paradise? It’s reality. If you allow it.
If you allow these images in your life, they will manifest for you.
Understand the power of thought.
It bends your reality and changes it.
It’s quantum physics 101.
To understand how to control your life, you have to realize this basic principle.
Thought is everything.
Control your thoughts and you control your life.
How do you feel after looking at all these drawings?
Do you feel sad? Gloomy? Or, do you feel positive and hopeful?
Whatever your age, and whatever your situation, I promise you that there is a GREAT life waiting for you.
Whether alone with a sunshine monkey daughter…
Or getting old and grouchy…
We all have some traits that define us in a good way. Embrace them.
You deserve it. You really, really do.
The art is about a boy and a girl falling in love.
Then, they get married and set up a home.
Then, they have a child.
And a kitty cat.
And another child.
And then they grow old together.
The art carries me away to happy times.
And I hope, that it carries you also to good places and happy times.
Have a wonderful day!
Do you want more?
I have more posts like this in my (underutilized, and rarely visited) Art Index. Please go there to see some more beauty…
One of the things that I was involved in; a hobby really, was the design of numerous wooden sail boats. This occurred when I was in land-locked Indiana. It was hot, boring, corn as far as the eye can see, and I worked in a “real life” Office Space environment. My only escape was hope.
I well remember the day trip that I, as a young AOC at NAS, NASC Pensacola, Florida and my class 21-83, enjoyed. It was on a 53 foot (as I recall) ketch, and we spent the afternoon sailing in Pensacola bay.
I well remember the sun, the breeze and how all my troubles melted away as we enjoyed the day. We learned basic seamanship, watched dolphins sail along side. We practiced overboard drills, and watched our sails go luffing.
But Indiana was harsh, cold and barron. I worked as a drone in a cubicle mill for the mega-company General Motors in one of their divisions; Delco Electronics.
And in those days, the hope was to sail away to an interesting place at the other side of the world. Here we will touch on some of the beauty of wooden sail craft. I had met numerous people who were building their own sailboats, mostly out of steel, and then hauling them to the great lakes and living their dream of freedom and escape. It appealed to me at that time, and I bought every book that I could get, and read them all voraciously.
I subscribed to magazines about sailing and adventure. I also equipped my home with a fine tool shop of wood and metal working tools, and bought the plans to construct a 53-foot ketch. I was that “into” the dream. There is really so much to cover in this venue, that I am just going to bounce around from here to there and let the pictures tell the story.
Sailboat Hull Types
Sailboats ride on different hulls, which differ in the total number of hulls and their shape. It’s really simple, actually.
The basic three hull types include:
Monohulls (one hull)
Catamarans (two hulls)
Trimarans (three hulls)
Monohulls Monohulls have one hull but that doesn’t make them all the same. Traditional monohulls may have full keels (heavy encapsulated ballast that runs along the bottom of the hull), cutaway keels (similar to full but the forefoot is cutaway allowing the boat greater maneuverability in tight quarters) or bolted on fin keels that may have a bulb at the bottom for extra ballast to keep the vessel stable.
Monohulls can also have a swing keel, daggerboard or centerboard that retracts up into an appendage in the hull itself.
With the keel or board up, the boat can enter shallow water and can travel faster downwind. With the keel down, the vessel tracks better upwind. Small monohulls like sailing dinghies, may also have shallow planing hulls that can surf off a wave.
Finally, monohulls can also foil on appendages (usually made of carbon fiber) with the actual hull out of the water when a minimum speed is reached.
Catamarans Catamarans (often nicknamed “cats”) have two hulls with a deck or trampoline in between. Large cats (35 feet and over) have become popular in charter use because they offer more interior and deck space and an easier motion to induce less seasickness. Small catamarans usually have just a trampoline in between the hulls and make fun daysailers.
Because catamarans don’t have deep and heavy keels, they tend to sail faster off the wind.
Foiling catamarans were made popular by the America’s Cup races and are proliferating into general cruising use.
Trimarans Trimarans have three hulls: a main hull and two amas (side hulls used for stability). On some trimarans, the arms that hold the amas can fold inward, making the trimaran narrower and in some cases trailerable. Large cruising trimaranas are gaining popularity because they are stable and fast sailers.
Sailboat Rig Types
Sailboat rigging includes:
the mast(s);
boom(s);
and the shrouds or stays that hold up the mast.
A sailboat with one mast is usually a sloop with one mainsail and one headsail. A cutter rig usually has one mast but two or more headsails. This rig “cuts” the foretriangle between the head (forward) stay and the main mast. Multiple headsails allow for flexible sail combinations in variable wind conditions.
Ketches and yawls have a secondary mast behind the main one. The ketch configuration places that mizzenmast behind the mainmast but ahead of the rudderpost while the yawl places it behind the post.
The second mast is shorter than the main mast. Both of these designs (split rigs) provide more sail area that isn’t reliant solely on the height of the mainmast and therefore can be easier to manage when sailing shorthanded.
Schooners also have multiple masts—two or more. However, the foremost mast is shorter than the main mast. Tall ship rigging is in its own category and can get quite complex.
Most Rigs are Marconi Rigs
Most of the rigs are known as Marconi rigs. Meaning that it’s just one sail to catch the wind. But my love is for the Gaff rigs. Here is there is a sail above it to catch the littlest wisps of air that lie above. It’s rarely seen today because it’s really a lot of work.
Sailboat Types by Primary Use
You can do many of the same things on all sailboats, but some types are more specialized.
Sailing dinghies: Small boats usually sailed by one or two people, sailing dinghies are often used to teach new sailors. That said, experts on high tech sailing dinghies compete in athletic racing up to Olympic level.
Day cruisers: Although any sailboat can be cruised for a day, day cruisers are often boats shorter than 30 feet that are designed to be sailed for an afternoon. They’re usually more Spartan in their outfitting and may or may not have a cabin with amenities.
Sailing cruisers: These sailboats can be monohulls or multihulls and are designed to cruise for weekends or longer. They usually have a berth (bed), a head (toilet) and a galley (kitchen). They can be sloop, cutter, ketch, yawl or schooner-rigged and vary in length (from 25-85 feet). Larger sailboats tend to fall into the crewed superyacht category.
Racing sailboats: Most offshore racers are larger boats crewed by multiple individuals while smaller racers can be single or double-handed. Racing boats are usually built lighter, have fin keels and laminate performance sails.
Racer/cruisers: These designs try to straddle the two above. They’re usually more lightly built cruisers with full amenities so they can be weekended. Some people will argue that these boats are a compromise for owners who want to primarily cruise but also race.
Bluewater cruising sailboats: These boats are designed to cross oceans or sail “blue waters.” They’re typically heavier in build with a stout rig and are fully equipped for extended offshore use.
Motorsailers: This term has fallen out of favor since it’s often pejorative. These sailboats may rely on the engine to sail in light wind conditions, especially due to their excessive weight.
Antique/classic sailboats: These are usually older restored vessels. They may be built of wood and have classic yawl rigs. These sailboats are often showcased in special events.
Sailboats occupy multiple segments and experienced sailors learn the finer points of design and use. Then, they never see two sailboats the same way again.
Just some pictures of beauty
We start with…
And this…
My love for these works of art has never diminished.
I was laid off. I wasn’t given any notice. I was just told to hand in my badge and never come back.
For the remaining five months I laboriously tried to find work elsewhere, and then when I did, I had to sell off most of my tools, books, and abandon the framework of my dream sailboat.
It’s called life.
You would think that my manager and his manager, and his boss, and the boss above them would have the compassion to give someone who worked for them for five years the consideration of a month’s notice, or some severance pay. But they didn’t.
I was only an engineer, and a disposable one at that.
So I left Indiana, and moved on with my life. And two years later, my life was substantially better, nicer, and in every way a great improvement.
So don’t get all caught up in the negative aspects of the twisty and turny thing called life.
You adapt to the changes as they are and not pine away for what you wish them to be.
I still have and possess my love of sail, water, the ocean, boats and all the rest.
Years passed.
I obtained work in the South Pacific in American Samoia.
However, after living in Pago Pago and actually meeting the people who wrote those articles praising the lifestyle, I (and my wife) decided that we really didn’t want to have any part of it. Pago Pago was beautiful. It was lovely. But the sailing LIFESTYLE was not.
Not at all. It’s a life of hardship and not as glamorous as it was made out to be in all those magazines and books that I read.
Yet, here I am.
I am living a life of adventure and delicious food.
So when one dream collapses another materializes to take it’s place. That too is called life.
Master Index . You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Jacob Collins is a living artist that I consider to be very talented and quite the master of the medium. His works speak to me, and I would like to share them with you. This is a simple article where we enjoy the art for the sake of beauty and nothing much else.
Please let’s enjoy the beauty of his art, for the sake of enjoyment only. Consider how you feel when you look at the paintings. I find art to be satisfying to me personally.
His art speaks to me. Like this first painting.
Nantucket Pines
Candlemaker’s Stove
Seated Nude
Trequanda Hillside
Tracks in Snow
Calle des Hornes
Grimaldi in Studio
Interior
Reclining Nude
Conclusion
Art isn’t a singular painting that some wealthy patron buys and hoards inside his house. It is everything.
It is the dew on the grass in the morning, to the sleek lines of your clothes iron. It is the smile on your pet’s face when it is napping after a meal, and the warmth of a pile of clothes out of the dryer on a cold, cold Winter day.
I just wanted to share these images with you all. I hope that you enjoyed them.
Have you ever wanted to try your hand at painting? It’s not hard. You watch a few Bob Ross videos and get started. It’s fun, and a great way to relax and pass the time.
I recommend it wholeheartedly.
Art comes in many forms. From cooking up a delicious meal, to planting a garden, to woodworking a fence or mailbox. I for one enjoy art in all it’s many forms.
I hope that you too appreciate art. Whether it is a painted image, or a delicious steak, or maybe a nice handmade rocking chair, or perhaps a hand made whimsy for your front yard.
Savor the creative aspects that lie inside of us all.
The following in one of Ray Bradbury’s short stories. It is titled “The Cement Mixer”. “The Concrete Mixer” is one of his earlier stories. It was first published in Thrilling Wonder Stories in April 1949. In the story, a warlike race of Martians plans their glorious conquest of Earth but one of them, Ettil Vrye, foresaw defeat. He was given his choice of joining the Legion of War —or burning his beloved instead!
The Concrete Mixer
HE LISTENED to the dry-grass rustle of the old witches’ voices beneath his open
window:
‘Ettil, the coward! Ettil, the refuser! Ettil, who will not wage the glorious
war of Mars against Earth!’
‘Speak on, witches!’ he cried.
The voices dropped to a murmur like that of water in the long canals under the
Martian sky.
‘Ettil, the father of a son who must grow up in the shadow of this horrid
knowledge!’ said the old wrinkled women. They knocked their sly-eyed heads
gently together. ‘Shame, shame!’
His wife was crying on the other side of the room. Her tears were as rain,
numerous and cool on the tiles. ‘Oh, Ettil, how can you think this way?’
Ettil laid aside his metal book which, at his beckoning, had been singing him a
story all morning from its thin golden-wired frame.
‘I’ve tried to explain,’ he said. ‘This is a foolish thing, Mars invading Earth.
We’ll be destroyed, utterly.’
…
Outside, a banging, crashing boom, a surge of brass, a drum, a cry, marching
feet, pennants and songs. Through the stone sheets the army, fire weapons to
shoulder, stamped. Children skipped after. Old women waved dirty flags.
‘I shall remain on Mars and read a book,’ said Ettil. A blunt knock on the door.
Tylla answered. Father-in-law stormed in. ‘What’s this I hear about my
son-in-law? A traitor?’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘You’re not fighting in the Martian Army?’
‘No, Father.’
‘Gods!’ The old father turned very red. ‘A plague on your name! You’ll be shot.’
‘Shoot me, then, and have it over.’
‘Who ever heard of a Martian not invading? Who!’
‘Nobody. It is, I admit, quite incredible.’
‘Incredible,’ husked the witch voices under the window.
‘Father, can’t you reason with him?’ demanded Tylla.
‘Reason with a dung heap,’ cried Father, eyes blazing. He came and stood over
Ettil. ‘Bands playing, a fine day, women weeping, children jumping, everything
right, men marching bravely, and you sit here! Oh, shame!’
‘Shame,’ sobbed the faraway voices in the hedge.
‘Get the devil out of my house with your inane chatter,’ said Ettil, exploding.
‘Take your medals and your drums and run!’
…
He shoved Father-in-law past a screaming wife, only to have the door thrown wide at this moment, as a military detail entered.
A voice shouted, ‘Ettil Vrye?’
‘Yes!’
‘You are under arrest!’
…
‘Good-by, my dear wife. I am off to the wars with these fools!’ shouted Ettil,
dragged through the door by the men in bronze mesh.
‘Good-by, good-by,’ said the town witches, fading away. . . .
…
The cell was neat and clean. Without a book, Ettil was nervous. He gripped the
bars and watched the rockets shoot up into the night air. The stars were cold
and numerous; they seemed to scatter when every rocket blasted up among them.
‘Fools,’ whispered Ettil. ‘Fools!’
…
The cell door opened. One man with a kind of vehicle entered, full of books;
books here, there, everywhere in the chambers of the vehicle. Behind him the
Military Assignor loomed.
‘Ettil Vrye, we want to know why you had these illegal Earth books in your
house. These copies of Wonder Stories, Scientific Tales, Fantastic Stories.
Explain.’ The man gripped Ettil’s wrist.
…
Ettil shook him free. ‘If you’re going to shoot me, shoot me. That literature,
from Earth, is the very reason why I won’t try to invade them. It’s the reason
why your invasion will fail.’
‘How so?’ The assignor scowled and turned to the yellowed magazines.
‘Pick any copy,’ said Ettil. ‘Any one at all. Nine out of ten stories in the
years 1929, ’30 to ’50, Earth calendar, have every Martian invasion successfully
invading Earth.’
‘Ah!’ The assignor smiled, nodded.
…
‘And then,’ said Ettil, ‘failing.’
‘That’s treason! Owning such literature!’
‘So be it, if you wish. But let me draw a few conclusions. Invariably, each
invasion is thwarted by a young man, usually lean, usually Irish, usually alone,
named Mick or Rick or Jick or Bannon, who destroys the Martians.’
‘You don’t believe that!’
‘No, I don’t believe Earthmen can actually do that’no. But they have a
background, understand, Assignor, of generations of children reading just such
fiction, absorbing it. They have nothing but a literature of invasions
successfully thwarted. Can you say the same for Martian literature?’
‘Well”’
‘No.’
‘I guess not.’
…
‘You know not. We never wrote stories of such a fantastic nature. Now we rebel,
we attack, and we shall die.’
‘I don’t see your reasoning on that. Where does this tie in with the magazine
stories?’
‘Morale. A big thing. The Earthmen know they can’t fail. It is in them like
blood beating in their veins. They cannot fail. They will repel each invasion,
no matter how well organized. Their youth of reading just such fiction as this
has given them a faith we cannot equal. We Martians? We are uncertain; we know that we might fail. Our morale is low, in spite of the banged drums and tooted horns.’
‘I won’t listen to this treason,’ cried the assignor. ‘This fiction will be burned, as you will be, within the next ten minutes. You have a choice, Ettil Vrye. Join the Legion of War, or burn.’
…
‘It is a choice of deaths. I choose to burn.’
…
‘Men!’
He was hustled out into the courtyard. There he saw his carefully hoarded
reading matter set to the torch. A special pit was prepared, with oil five feet
deep in it. This, with a great thunder, was set afire. Into this, in a minute,
he would be pushed.
On the far side of the courtyard, in shadow, he noticed the solemn figure of his
son standing alone, his great yellow eyes luminous with sorrow and fear. He did
not put out his hand or speak, but only looked at his father like some dying
animal, a wordless animal seeking rescue.
Ettil looked at the flaming pit. He felt the rough hands seize him, strip him,
push him forward to the hot perimeter of death. Only then did Ettil swallow and
cry out, ‘Wait!’
The assignor’s face, bright with the orange fire, pushed forward in the
trembling air. ‘What is it?’
…
‘I will join the Legion of War,’ replied Ettil.
‘Good! Release him!’
The hands fell away.
As he turned he saw his son standing far across the court, waiting. His son was
not smiling, only waiting.
…
In the sky a bronze rocket leaped across the stars, ablaze. . . .
…
‘And now we bid good-by to these stalwart warriors,’ said the assignor. The band
thumped and the wind blew a fine sweet rain of tears gently upon the sweating
army. The children cavorted. In the chaos Ettil saw his wife weeping with pride,
his son solemn and silent at her side.
They marched into the ship, everybody laughing and brave. They buckled
themselves into their spiderwebs. All through the tense ship the spiderwebs were
filled with lounging, lazy men. They chewed on bits of food and waited. A great
lid slammed shut. A valve hissed.
‘Off to Earth and destruction,’ whispered Ettil.
‘What?’ asked someone.
‘Off to glorious victory,’ said Ettil, grimacing.
The rocket jumped.
…
Space, thought Ettil. Here we are banging across black inks and pink lights of
space in a brass kettle. Here we are, a celebratory rocket heaved out to fill
the Earthmen’s eyes with fear flames as they look up to the sky. What is it
like, being far, far away from your home, your wife, your child, here and now?
He tried to analyze his trembling. It was like tying your most secret inward
working organs to Mars and then jumping out a million miles. Your heart was
still on Mars, pumping, glowing. Your brain was still on Mars, thinking,
crenulated, like an abandoned torch. Your stomach was still on Mars, somnolent,
trying to digest the final dinner. Your lungs were still in the cool blue wine
air of Mars, a soft folded bellows screaming for release, one part of you
longing for the rest.
For here you were, a meshless, cogless automaton, a body upon which officials
had performed clinical autopsy and left all of you that counted back upon the
empty seas and strewn over the darkened hills. Here you were, bottle-empty,
fireless, chill, with only your hands to give death to Earthmen. A pair of hands
is all you are now, he thought in cold remoteness.
Here you lie in the tremendous web. Others are about you, but they are
whole’whole hearts and bodies. But all of you that lives is back there walking
the desolate seas in evening winds. This thing here, this cold clay thing, is
already dead.
…
‘Attack stations, attack stations, attack!’
‘Ready, ready, ready!’
‘Up!’
‘Out of the webs, quick!’
…
Ettil moved. Somewhere before him his two cold hands moved.
How swift it has all been, he thought. A year ago one Earth rocket reached Mars.
Our scientists, with their incredible telepathic ability, copied it; our
workers, with their incredible plants, reproduced it a hundredfold. No other
Earth ship has reached Mars since then, and yet we know their language
perfectly, all of us. We know their culture, their logic. And we shall pay the
price of our brilliance.
‘Guns on the ready!’
‘Right!’
‘Sights!’
‘Reading by miles?’
‘Ten thousand!’
‘Attack!’
…
A humming silence. A silence of insects throbbing in the walls of the rocket.
The insect singing of tiny bobbins and levers and whirls of wheels. Silence of
waiting men. Silence of glands emitting the slow steady pulse of sweat under
arm, on brow, under staring pale eyes!
‘Wait! Ready!’
Ettil hung onto his sanity with his fingernails, hung hard and long.
Silence, silence, silence. Waiting.
Teeee-e-ee!
‘What’s that?’
‘Earth radio!’
‘Cut them in!’
‘They’re trying to reach us, call us. Cut them in!’
Eee-e-e!
‘Here they are! Listen!’
…
‘Calling Martian invasion fleet!’
The listening silence, the insect hum pulling back to let the sharp Earth voice
crack in upon the rooms of waiting men.
‘This is Earth calling. This is William Sommers, president of the Association of
United American Producers!’
Ettil held tight to his station, bent forward, eyes shut.
‘Welcome to Earth.’
‘What?’ the men in the rocket roared. ‘What did he say?’
‘Yes, welcome to Earth.’
‘It’s a trick!’
…
Ettil shivered, opened his eyes to stare in bewilderment at the unseen voice
from the ceiling source.
‘Welcome! Welcome to green, industrial Earth!’ declared the friendly voice.
‘With open arms we welcome you, to turn a bloody invasion into a time of
friendships that will last through all of Time.’
‘A trick!’
‘Hush, listen!’
‘Many years ago we of Earth renounced war, destroyed our atom bombs. Now,
unprepared as we are, there is nothing for us but to welcome you. The planet is
yours. We ask only mercy from you good and merciful invaders.’
…
‘It can’t be true!’ a voice whispered.
‘It must be a trick!’
‘Land and be welcomed, all of you,’ said Mr. William Sommers of Earth. ‘Land
anywhere. Earth is yours; we are all brothers!’
Ettil began to laugh. Everyone in the room turned to see him. The other Martians
blinked. ‘He’s gone mad!’
He did not stop laughing until they hit him.
…
The tiny fat man in the center of the hot rocket tarmac at Green Town,
California, jerked out a clean white handkerchief and touched it to his wet
brow. He squinted blindly from the fresh plank platform at the fifty thousand
people restrained behind a fence of policemen, arm to arm. Everybody looked at
the sky.
‘There they are!’
A gasp.
‘No, just sea gulls!’
A disappointed grumble.
‘I’m beginning to think it would have been better to have declared war on them,’
whispered the mayor. ‘Then we could all go home.’
‘Sh-h!’ said his wife.
‘There!’ The crowd roared.
Out of the sun came the Martian rockets.
‘Everybody ready?’ The mayor glanced nervously about.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Miss California 1965.
‘Yes,’ said Miss America 1940, who had come rushing up at the last minute as a
substitute for Miss America 1966, who was ill at home.
‘Yes siree,’ said Mr. Biggest Grapefruit in San Fernando Valley 1956, eagerly.
‘Ready, band?’
The band poised its brass like so many guns.
‘Ready!’
The rockets landed. ‘Go!’
The band played ‘California, Here I Come’ ten times. From noon until one o’clock
the mayor made a speech, shaking his hands in the direction of the silent,
apprehensive rockets.
…
At one-fifteen the seals of the rockets opened
The band played ‘Oh, You Golden State’ three times.
Ettil and fifty other Martians leaped out, guns at the ready.
The mayor ran forward with the key to Earth in his hands.
The band played ‘Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,’ and a full chorus of singers
imported from Long Beach sang different words to it, something about ‘Martians
Are Coming to Town.’
Seeing no weapons about, the Martians relaxed, but kept their guns out.
From one-thirty until two-fifteen the mayor made the same speech over for the
benefit of the Martians.
At two-thirty Miss America of 1940 volunteered to kiss all the Martians if they
lined up.
At two-thirty and ten seconds the band played ‘How Do You Do, Everybody,’ to
cover up the confusion caused by Miss America’s suggestion.
At two thirty-five Mr. Biggest Grapefruit presented the Martians with a two-ton
truck full of grapefruit.
At two thirty-seven the mayor gave them all free passes to the Elite and
Majestic theaters, combining this gesture with another speech which lasted until
after three.
The band played, and the fifty thousand people sang, ‘For They Are Jolly Good
Fellows.’
It was over at four o’clock.
…
Ettil sat down in the shadow of the rocket, two of his fellows with him. ‘So
this is Earth!’
‘I say kill the filthy rats,’ said one Martian. ‘I don’t trust them. They’re
sneaky. What’s their motive for treating us this way?’ He held up a box of
something that rustled. ‘What’s this stuff they gave me? A sample, they said.’
He read the label. BLIX, the new sudsy soap.
The crowd had drifted about, was mingling with the Martians like a carnival
throng. Everywhere was the buzzing murmur of people fingering the rockets,
asking questions.
…
Ettil was cold. He was beginning to tremble even more now. ‘Don’t you feel it?’
he whispered. ‘The tenseness, the evilness of all this. Something’s going to
happen to us. They have some plan. Something subtle and horrible. They’re going
to do something to us’I know.’
‘I say kill every one of them!’
‘How can you kill people who call you ‘pal’ and ‘buddy’?’ asked another Martian.
Ettil shook his head. ‘They’re sincere. And yet I feel as if we were in a big
acid vat melting away, away. I’m frightened.’ He put his mind out to touch among
the crowd. ‘Yes, they’re really friendly, hail-fellows-well-met (one of their
terms). One huge mass of common men, loving dogs and cats and Martians equally.
And yet’ and yet”’
The band played ‘Roll Out the Barrel.’ Free beer was being distributed through
the courtesy of Hagenback Beer, Fresno, California.
…
The sickness came.
The men poured out fountains of slush from their mouths. The sound of sickness
filled the land.
Gagging, Ettil sat beneath a sycamore tree. ‘A plot, a plot’a horrible plot,’ he
groaned, holding his stomach.
‘What did you eat?’ The assignor stood over him.
‘Something that they called popcorn,’ groaned Ettil.
‘And?’
‘And some sort of long meat on a bun, and some yellow liquid in an iced vat, and
some sort of fish and something called pastrami,’ sighed Ettil, eyelids
flickering.
The moans of the Martian invaders sounded all about.
‘Kill the plotting snakes!’ somebody cried weakly.
‘Hold on,’ said the assignor. ‘It’s merely hospitality. They overdid it. Up on
your feet now, men. Into the town. We’ve got to place small garrisons of men
about to make sure all is well. Other ships are landing in other cities. We’ve
our job to do here.’
The men gained their feet and stood blinking stupidly about.
‘Forward, march!’
One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four! . . .
…
The white stores of the little town lay dreaming in shimmering heat. Heat
emanated from everything’poles, concrete, metal, awnings, roofs, tar
paper’everything.
The sound of Martian feet sounded on the asphalt.
‘Careful, men!’ whispered the assignor. They walked past a beauty shop.
From inside, a furtive giggle. ‘Look!’
A coppery head bobbed and vanished like a doll in the window. A blue eye glinted
and winked at a keyhole.
‘It’s a plot,’ whispered Ettil. ‘A plot, I tell you!’
The odors of perfume were fanned out on the summer air by the whirling vents of
the grottoes where the women hid like undersea creatures, under electric cones,
their hair curled into wild whorls and peaks, their eyes shrewd and glassy,
animal and sly, their mouths painted a neon red. Fans were whirring, the
perfumed wind issuing upon the stillness, moving among green trees, creeping
among the amazed Martians.
‘For God’s sake!’ screamed Ettil, his nerves suddenly breaking loose. ‘Let’s get
in our rockets’go home! They’ll get us! Those horrid things in there. See them?
Those evil undersea things, those women in their cool little caverns of
artificial rock!’
‘Shut up!’
Look at them in there, he thought, drifting their dresses like cool green gills
over their pillar legs. He shouted.
‘Someone shut his mouth!’
‘They’ll rush out on us, hurling chocolate boxes and copies of Kleig Love and
Holly Pick-ture, shrieking with their red greasy mouths! Inundate us with
banality, destroy our sensibilities! Look at them, being electrocuted by
devices, their voices like hums and chants and murmurs! Do you dare go in
there?’
‘Why not?’ asked the other Martians.
‘They’ll fry you, bleach you, change you! Crack you, flake you away until you’re
nothing but a husband, a working man, the one with the money who pays so they
can come sit in there devouring their evil chocolates! Do you think you could
control them?’
‘Yes, by the gods!’
From a distance a voice drifted, a high and shrill voice, a woman’s voice
saying, ‘Ain’t that middle one there cute?’
‘Martians ain’t so bad after all. Gee, they’re just men,’ said another, fading.
‘Hey, there. Yoo-hoo! Martians! Hey!’
Yelling, Ettil ran. . . .
…
He sat in a park and trembled steadily. He remembered what he had seen. Looking up at the dark night sky, he felt so far from home, so deserted. Even now, as he sat among the still trees, in the distance he could see Martian warriors walking the streets with the Earth women, vanishing into the phantom darknesses of the little emotion palaces to hear the ghastly sounds of white things moving on gray screens, with little frizz-haired women beside them, wads of gelatinous gum working in their jaws, other wads under the seats, hardening with the fossil imprints of the women’s tiny cat teeth forever imbedded therein. The cave of winds’the cinema.
‘Hello.’
He jerked his head in terror.
A woman sat on the bench beside him, chewing gum lazily. ‘Don’t run off; I don’t
bite,’ she said.
‘Oh,’ he said.
‘Like to go to the pictures?’ she said.
‘No.’
‘Aw, come on,’ she said. ‘Everybody else is.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Is that all you do in this world?’
‘All? Ain’t that enough?’ Her blue eyes widened suspiciously. ‘What you want me
to do’sit home, read a book? Ha, ha! That’s rich.’
…
Ettil stared at her a moment before asking a question.
‘Do you do anything else?’ he asked.
‘Ride in cars. You got a car? You oughta get you a big new convertible Podler
Six. Gee, they’re fancy! Any man with a Podler Six can go out with any gal, you
bet!’ she said, blinking at him. ‘I bet you got all kinds of money’you come from
Mars and all. I bet if you really wanted you could get a Podler Six and travel
everywhere.’
‘To the show maybe?’
‘What’s wrong with ‘at?’
‘Nothing’ nothing.’
…
‘You know what you talk like, mister?’ she said. ‘A Communist! Yes, sir, that’s
the kinda talk nobody stands for, by gosh. Nothing wrong with our little old
system. We was good enough to let you Martians invade, and we never raised even our bitty finger, did we?’
‘That’s what I’ve been trying to understand,’ said Ettil. ‘Why did you let us?’
”Cause we’re bighearted, mister; that’s why! Just remember that, bighearted.’
She walked off to look for someone else.
…
Gathering courage to himself, Ettil began to write a letter to his wife, moving
the pen carefully over the paper on his knee.
‘Dear Tylla”’
But again he was interrupted. A small-little-girl-of-an-old-woman, with a pale
round wrinkled little face, shook her tambourine in front of his nose, forcing
him to glance up.
‘Brother,’ she cried, eyes blazing. ‘Have you been saved?’
‘Am I in danger?’ Ettil dropped his pen, jumping.
‘Terrible danger!’ she wailed, clanking her tambourine, gazing at the sky. ‘You
need to be saved, brother, in the worst way!’
‘I’m inclined to agree,’ he said, trembling.
‘We saved lots already today. I saved three myself, of you Mars people. Ain’t
that nice?’ She grinned at him.
‘I guess so.’
She was acutely suspicious. She leaned forward with her secret whisper.
‘Brother,’ she wanted to know, ‘you been baptized?’
‘I don’t know,’ he whispered back.
‘You don’t know?’ she cried, flinging up hand and tambourine.
‘Is it like being shot?’ he asked.
‘Brother,’ she said, ‘you are in a bad and sinful condition. I blame it on your
ignorant bringing up. I bet those schools on Mars are terrible’don’t teach you
no truth at all. Just a pack of made-up lies. Brother, you got to be baptized if
you want to be happy.’
‘Will it make me happy even in this world here?’ he said. ‘Don’t ask for
everything on your platter,’ she said. ‘Be satisfied with a wrinkled pea, for
there’s another world we’re all going to that’s better than this one.’
…
‘I know that world,’ he said.
‘It’s peaceful,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘There’s quiet,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘There’s milk and honey flowing.’
‘Why, yes,’ he said.
‘And everybody’s laughing.’
‘I can see it now,’ he said.
‘A better world,’ she said.
‘Far better,’ he said. ‘Yes, Mars is a great planet.’
…
‘Mister,’ she said, tightening up and almost flinging the tambourine in his
face, ‘you been joking with me?’
‘Why, no.’ He was embarrassed and bewildered. ‘I thought you were talking
about”’
‘Not about mean old nasty Mars, I tell you, mister! It’s your type that is going
to boil for years, and suffer and break out in black pimples and be tortured”’
‘I must admit Earth isn’t very nice. You’ve described it beautifully.’
‘Mister, you’re funning me again!’ she cried angrily.
‘No, no’please. I plead ignorance.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’re a heathen, and heathens are improper. Here’s a paper.
Come to this address tomorrow night and be baptized and be happy. We shouts and we stomps and we talk in voices, so if you want to hear our all-cornet,
all-brass band, you come, won’t you now?’
‘I’ll try,’ he said hesitantly.
Down the street she went, patting her tambourine, singing at the top of her
voice, ‘Happy Am I, I’m Always Happy.’
…
Dazed, Ettil returned to his letter.
‘Dear Tylla: To think that in my na’vet’ I imagined that the Earthmen would have
to counterattack with guns and bombs. No, no. I was sadly wrong. There is no
Rick or Mick or Jick or Bannon’those lever fellows who save worlds. No.
‘There are blond robots with pink rubber bodies, real, but somehow unreal, alive
but somehow automatic in all responses, living in caves all of their lives.
Their derri’res are incredible in girth. Their eyes are fixed and motionless
from an endless time of staring at picture screens. The only muscles they have
occur in their jaws from their ceaseless chewing of gum.
‘And it is not only these, my dear Tylla, but the entire civilization into which
we have been dropped like a shovelful of seeds into a large concrete mixer.
Nothing of us will survive. We will be killed not by the gun but by the
glad-hand. We will be destroyed not by the rocket but by the automobile . . .’
…
Somebody screamed. A crash, another crash. Silence.
Ettil leaped up from his letter. Outside, on the street two ears had crashed.
One full of Martians, another with Earthmen. Ettil returned to his letter:
‘Dear, dear Tylla, a few statistics if you will allow. Forty-five thousand
people killed every year on this continent of America; made into jelly right in
the can, as it were, in the automobiles. Red blood jelly, with white marrow
bones like sudden thoughts, ridiculous horror thoughts, transfixed in the
immutable jelly. The cars roll up in tight neat sardine rolls’all sauce, all
silence.
‘Blood manure for green buzzing summer flies, all over the highways. Faces made into Halloween masks by sudden stops. Halloween is one of their holidays. I think they worship the automobile on that night’something to do with death,
anyway.
‘You look out your window and see two people lying atop each other in friendly
fashion who, a moment ago, had never met before, dead. I foresee our army
mashed, diseased, trapped in cinemas by witches and gum. Sometime in the next
day I shall try to escape back to Mars before it is too late.
‘Somewhere on Earth tonight, my Tylla, there is a Man with a Lever, which, when
he pulls it, Will Save the World. The man is now unemployed. His switch gathers
dust. He himself plays pinochle.
‘The women of this evil planet are drowning us in a tide of banal
sentimentality, misplaced romance, and one last fling before the makers of
glycerin boil them down for usage. Good night, Tylla. Wish me well, for I shall
probably die trying to escape. My love to our child.’
Weeping silently, he folded the letter and reminded himself to mail it later at
the rocket post.
…
He left the park. What was there to do? Escape? But how? Return to the post late
tonight, steal one of the rockets alone and go back to Mars? Would it be
possible? He shook his head. He was much too confused.
All that he really knew was that if he stayed here he would soon be the property
of a lot of things that buzzed and snorted and hissed, that gave off fumes or
stenches. In six months he would be the owner of a large pink, trained ulcer, a
blood pressure of algebraic dimensions, a myopia this side of blindness, and
nightmares as deep as oceans and infested with improbable lengths of dream
intestines through which he must violently force his way each night. No, no.
He looked at the haunted faces of the Earthmen drifting violently along in their
mechanical death boxes. Soon’yes, very soon’they would invent an auto with six
silver handles on it!
‘Hey, there!’
An auto horn. A large long hearse of a car, black and ominous pulled to the
curb. A man leaned out.
‘You a Martian?’
‘Yes.’
‘Just the man I gotta see. Hop in quick’the chance of a lifetime. Hop in. Take
you to a real nice joint where we can talk. Come on’don’t stand there.’
As if hypnotized, Ettil opened the door of the car, got in.
They drove off.
‘What’ll it be, E.V.? How about a manhattan? Two manhattans, waiter. Okay, E.V.
This is my treat. This is on me and Big Studios! Don’t even touch your wallet.
Pleased to meet you, E.V. My name’s R. R. Van Plank. Maybe you hearda me? No?
Well, shake anyhow.’
Ettil felt his hand massaged and dropped. They were in a dark hole with music
and waiters drifting about. Two drinks were set down. It had all happened so
swiftly. Now Van Plank, hands crossed on his chest, was surveying his Martian
discovery.
‘What I want you for, E.V., is this. It’s the most magnanimous idea I ever got
in my life. I don’t know how it came to me, just in a flash. I was sitting home
tonight and I thought to myself, My God, what a picture it would make! Invasion
of Earth by Mars. So what I got to do? I got to find an adviser for the film. So
I climbed in my car and found you and here we are. Drink up! Here’s to your
health and our future. Skoal!’
‘But”’ said Ettil.
‘Now, I know, you’ll want money. Well, we got plenty of that. Besides, I got a
li’l black book full of peaches I can lend you.’
‘I don’t like most of your Earth fruit and”’
‘You’re a card, mac, really. Well, here’s how I get the picture in my
mind’listen.’ He leaned forward excitedly. ‘We got a flash scene of the Martians
at a big powwow, drummin’ drums, gettin’ stewed on Mars. In the background are
huge silver cities”’
‘But that’s not the way Martian cities are”’
‘We got to have color, kid. Color. Let your pappy fix this. Anyway, there are
all the Martians doing a dance around a fire”’
‘We don’t dance around fires”’
‘In this film you got a fire and you dance,’ declared Van Plank, eyes shut,
proud of his certainty. He nodded, dreaming it over on his tongue. ‘Then we got
a beautiful Martian woman, tall and blond.’
‘Martian women are dark”’
‘Look, I don’t see how we’re going to be happy, E.V. By the way, son, you ought
to change your name. What was it again?’
‘Ettil.’
‘That’s a woman’s name. I’ll give you a better one. Call you Joe. Okay, Joe. As
I was saying, our Martian women are gonna be blond, because, see, just because.
Or else your poppa won’t be happy. You got any suggestions?’
‘I thought that”’
‘And another thing we gotta have is a scene, very tearful, where the Martian
woman saves the whole ship of Martian men from dying when a meteor or something hits the ship. That’ll make a whackeroo of a scene. You know, I’m glad I found you, Joe. You’re going to have a good deal with us, I tell you.’
Ettil reached out and held the man’s wrist tight. ‘Just a minute. There’s
something I want to ask you.’
‘Sure, Joe, shoot.’
‘Why are you being so nice to us? We invade your planet, and you welcome
us’everybody’like long-lost children. Why?’
‘They sure grow ’em green on Mars, don’t they? You’re a na’ve-type guy’I can see
from way over here. Mac, look at it this way. We’re all Little People, ain’t
we?’ He waved a small tan hand garnished with emeralds.
‘We’re all common as dirt, ain’t we? Well, here on Earth, we’re proud of that.
This is the century of the Common Man, Bill, and we’re proud we’re small. Billy,
you’re looking at a planet full of Saroyans. Yes, sir. A great big fat family of
friendly Saroyans’everybody loving everybody. We understand you Martians, Joe,
and we know why you invaded Earth. We know how lonely you were up on that little cold planet Mars, how you envied us our cities”’
‘Our civilization is much older than yours”’
‘Please, Joe, you make me unhappy when you interrupt. Let me finish my theory
and then you talk all you want. As I was saying, you was lonely up there, and
down you came to see our cities and our women and all, and we welcomed you in, because you’re our brothers, Common Men like all of us.
‘And then, as a kind of side incident, Roscoe, there’s a certain little small
profit to be had from this invasion. I mean for instance this picture I plan,
which will net us, neat, a billion dollars, I bet. Next week we start putting
out a special Martian doll at thirty bucks a throw. Think of the millions there.
I also got a contract to make a Martian game to sell for five bucks. There’s all
sorts of angles.’
‘I see,’ said Ettil, drawing back.
‘And then of course there’s that whole nice new market. Think of all the
depilatories and gum and shoeshine we can sell to you Martians.’
‘Wait. Another question.’
‘Shoot.’
‘What’s your first name? What’s the R.R. stand for?’
‘Richard Robert.’
Ettil looked at the ceiling. ‘Do they sometimes, perhaps, on occasion, once in a
while, by accident, call you ‘Rick?’
‘How’d you guess, mac? Rick, sure.’
Ettil sighed and began to laugh and laugh. He put out his hand. ‘So you’re Rick?
Rick! So you’re Rick!’
‘What’s the joke, laughing boy? Let Poppa in!’
‘You wouldn’t understand’a private joke. Ha, ha!’ Tears ran down his cheeks and
into his open mouth. He pounded the table again and again. ‘So you’re Rick. Oh,
how different, how funny. No bulging muscles, no lean jaw, no gun. Only a wallet
full of money and an emerald ring and a big middle!’
‘Hey, watch the language! I may not be no Apollo, but”’
‘Shake hands, Rick. I’ve wanted to meet you. You’re the man who’ll conquer Mars,
with cocktail shakers and foot arches and poker chips and riding crops and
leather boots and checkered caps and rum collinses.’
‘I’m only a humble businessman,’ said Van Plank, eyes slyly down. ‘I do my work
and take my humble little piece of money pie. But, as I was saying, Mort, I been
thinking of the market on Mars for Uncle Wiggily games and Dick Tracy comics;
all new. A big wide field never even heard of cartoons, right? Right! So we just
toss a great big bunch of stuff on the Martians’ heads. They’ll fight for it,
kid, fight! Who wouldn’t, for perfumes and Paris dresses and Oshkosh overalls,
eh? And nice new shoes”’
‘We don’t wear shoes.’
‘What have I got here?’ R.R. asked of the ceiling. ‘A planet full of Okies?
Look, Joe, we’ll take care of that. We’ll shame everyone into wearing shoes.
Then we sell them the polish!’
‘Oh.’
He slapped Ettil’s. arm. ‘Is it a deal? Will you be technical director on my
film? You’ll get two hundred a week to start, a five-hundred top. What you say?’
‘I’m sick,’ said Ettil. He had drunk the manhattan and was now turning blue.
‘Say, I’m sorry. I didn’t know it would do that to you. Let’s get some fresh
air.’
…
In the open air Ettil felt better. He swayed. ‘So that’s why Earth took us in?’
‘Sure, son. Any time an Earthman can turn an honest dollar, watch him steam. The customer is always right. No hard feelings. Here’s my card. Be at the studio in
Hollywood tomorrow morning at nine o’clock. They’ll show you your office. I’ll
arrive at eleven and see you then. Be sure you get there at nine o’clock. It’s a
strict rule.’
‘Why?’
‘Gallagher, you’re a queer oyster, but I love you. Good night. Happy invasion!’
The car drove off.
…
Ettil blinked after it, incredulous. Then, rubbing his brow with the palm of his
hand, he walked slowly along the street toward the rocket port.
‘Well, what are you going to do?’ he asked himself, aloud. The rockets lay
gleaming in the moonlight silent. From the city came the sounds of distant
revelry. In the medical compound an extreme case of nervous breakdown was being tended to: a young Martian who, by his screams, had seen too much, drunk too much, heard too many songs on the little red-and-yellow boxes in the drinking places, and had been chased around innumerable tables by a large elephant-like woman. He kept murmuring:
‘Can’t breathe . . . crushed, trapped.’
The sobbing faded. Ettil came out of the shadows and moved on across a wide
avenue toward the ships. Far over, he could see the guards lying about
drunkenly. He listened. From the vast city came the faint sounds of cars and
music and sirens. And he imagined other sounds too: the insidious whir of malt
machines stirring malts to fatten the warriors and make them lazy and forgetful,
the narcotic voices of the cinema caverns lulling and lulling the Martians fast,
fast into a slumber through which, all of their remaining lives, they would
sleepwalk.
A year from now, how many Martians dead of cirrhosis of the liver, bad kidneys,
high blood pressure, suicide?
He stood in the middle of the empty avenue. Two blocks away a car was rushing
toward him.
He had a choice: stay here, take the studio job, report for work each morning as
adviser on a picture, and, in time, come to agree with the producer that, yes
indeed, there were massacres on Mars; yes, the women were tall and blond; yes,
there were tribal dances and sacrifices; yes, yes, yes. Or he could walk over
and get into a rocket ship and, alone, return to Mars.
‘But what about next year?’ he said.
The Blue Canal Night Club brought to Mars. The Ancient City Gambling Casino,
Built Right Inside. Yes, Right Inside a Real Martian Ancient City! Neons, racing
forms blowing in the old cities, picnic lunches in the ancestral graveyards’all
of it, all of it.
But not quite yet. In a few days he could be home. Tylla would be waiting with
their son, and then for the last few years of gentle life he might sit with his
wife in the blowing weather on the edge of the canal reading his good, gentle
books, sipping a rare and light wine, talking and living out their short time
until the neon bewilderment fell from the sky.
And then perhaps he and Tylla might move into the blue mountains and hide for
another year or two until the tourists came to snap their cameras and say how
quaint things were.
…
He knew just what he would say to Tylla. ‘War is a bad thing, but peace can be a
living horror.’
He stood in the middle of the wide avenue.
Turning, it was with no surprise that he saw a car bearing down upon him, a car
full of screaming children. These boys and girls, none older than sixteen, were
swerving and ricocheting their open-top car down the avenue. He saw them point at him and yell. He heard the motor roar louder. The car sped forward at sixty miles an hour.
He began to run.
Yes, yes, he thought tiredly, with the car upon him, how strange, how sad. It
sounds so much like . . . a concrete mixer.
This article is a slow moving, fine meandering, easy going, stroll through various works of art. I hope that you enjoy it, and perhaps are inspired by it to some degree. This is a general article, and no particular painter is promoted. Though, you will notice that many of the fine works by these artists are now long gone and lost in the dust-bin of history.
Head’s up to “Ohio Guy” for his awareness.
Max Seliger – Archers
Not much is known about this man. But I do really love his form and attention to the male figure. For me, I have always found it far more interesting to draw and paint the male figure as opposed to the female figure. I just never could get the curves and softness of a woman’s body correctly. However, men’s bodies were much easier to draw and paint, and far more interesting. (From an artist’s perspective.) While women’s tended to focus on the eyes, the hair, and the clothing.
Another lonely singular remaining work of art. This time of the female form. Also two figures crammed into one painting. I find it lovely. But that is just me.
You will notice that the muscle definition on the female is very subtle and soft. The smooth shading of shadows is particularly difficult to render. I worked out a technique where I would paint a lighter under panting, and then paint over it with a slightly darker flesh tone, then using a rag, I would wipe away the upper layer and then apply a wash. It’s a nice effect.
You will note that the positioning of the clothing, instruments and objects all served to cover the genitals for a very timid Victorian audience.
It’s not simply the muscle tone and definition that is important in fine at, but also the clothing, the textures and the lighting. So many aspects come into play. Here’s a nice example. I think that this is a very nicely done painting. It doesn’t strike me emotionally as others do, but I find it a treasure never the less.
I really love the details in this work of art. Obviously the artist was a fine draftsman and then colored the work afterwards with thin washes of oils, layer after layer until the desired effects were achieved. I love the expressions on the faces, and the details on the woman’s dresses.
Marcus was a Victorian Romanticist painter, history painter, illustrator and genre painter. He tries to convey snapshots of emotion in his works, and this painting is typical.
What I find so appealing in this painting are the details in the skirt. Just look at this masterpiece. It’s wonderful.
Julius Adam- Painter of kittens
I really love this artist because he loved to paint kittens.
Anyone who can manage to paint kittens, those forever moving bundles of fur, is an expert in my book. Only seven paintings of his survive. The rest were destroyed during World Wars I and II.
He was a German painter, and his works certainly ended up in many a fine home that was later bombed into oblivion by the Allied forces in the 1940’s.
I am not usually a fan of landscapes. They tend to be calming to the point of blandness. However, Oswald here has some nice works that would really look nice in a hallway or in a living room or study.
That’s nice. Here’s a rather nice study of a tree in a wooded glade…
And this one depicts a Shepard and his flock… look closely, the figures are tiny, tiny, tiny.
Here’s a fine artist. He’s known as a Golden Age Illustrator painter, illustrator and muralist. Some of his works are just spectacular. Such as this one. Note that the young man is wearing red, a bright color to attract attention while the woman is a harlot as denoted by here green sleeves. You will note that a mistral is playing music in the background and the only thing missing is a bottle or jug of wine. All in all a very nice painting.
Another nice painting, and sorry for the embedded watermarks due to the screen capture.
Eleanor Duchess of Gloucester was forced to undertake public penance and walk through the city of London without a hood, and bearing a lighted taper. Life imprisonment in various remote locations followed.
In July 1446 she was sent to Peel Castle (Manx: Cashtal Purt ny h-Inshey) on the Isle of Man (Mannin) in the north of the Irish Sea.
What was her crime?
Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, was a mistress and the second wife of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. A convicted sorceress, her imprisonment for treasonable necromancy in 1441 was a cause célèbre.
The Penance of Eleanor, Dutchess of Gloucester is an oil painting by Edwin Austin Abbey, finished in 1890. The painting is quite large, at 85″ wide and 49″ tall. It depicts Eleanor, former mistress, and now wife of the Duke of Gloucester, performing penance for her crime of consulting with sorcerers to help the Duke gain the throne.
Study
A “study” is where the artist makes a series of rough sketches of the idea for a painting. Some are very rough. Some are detailed drawings and paintings of various important aspects of the art. And some are beautiful in their own right. Here’s a perfect example of one by Edwin Austin Abbey. This one is with back and white chalk on a tan paper with high-lighted details in black ink by pen.
I personally think that it is awesome.
And here’s another one in Gouache. It’s a nice medium. Though I never had the opportunity to practice using this method.
Conclusion
Did you know that almost every museum has one day that allows for free entry to the museum. This is most especially true for art museums. All you need to do is look up (Google) the local museums nearby and then go to their websites (they all have one). There are the times when they are opened and which days are free, and whether or not there are special events.
Present your Electronic Benefit Transfer card (EBT Card) from any state (Pennsylvania Access card, Ohio Direction card, West Virginia Mountain State card, etc.) and receive general admission for up to four people at $1 each at Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History. Simply present your EBT Card along with a matching photo ID. This program is supported by BNY Mellon.
It’s a perfect opportunity to visit a local museum if you are unemployed and want some inspiration, or a good excuse to take a day off from work for you to make a date with your spouse of special friend.
You do not have to park at the site. You go to cheap parking and take a bus to the museum. All cities have bus stops near their museums and parks.
Hint. Hint. Hint.
Make a day of it. A nice ride, then a nice lunch. Then a visit to the museum, and finish up with a trip to an ice cream parlor for coffee and a sundae. Wouldn’t that be nice? I think it would be. We are so very used to doing our routines that life tends to pass us by. Don’t allow that. Go out and try to enjoy it.
A free trip to a museum, a coffee and a sundae, and maybe a blue plate special for lunch. How expensive can that be. And you know, in one week it’s going to be middle of October. This is a special golden time throughout most of the planet.
It will be a lovely day.
What a nice thing to plan. What a nice event you can generate. Make memories. Make friends. Enjoy yourself.
Do you want more?
I have more articles on art and art related interests please go here…
This is a nice story by Ray Bradbury. It takes you to a point in time. It’s about being alone. I do hope that you appreciate this story like I do. It’s a great story that takes place on Mars. This is in PDF format for easy reading.
The long years
Ray Bradbury
Conclusion
It’s a very short story.
I think that this story stands alone on it’s own merits.
Loneliness is an unpleasant emotional response to perceived isolation. Loneliness is also described as social pain—a psychological mechanism which motivates individuals to seek social connections. It is often associated with an unwanted lack of connection and intimacy. Loneliness overlaps and yet is distinct from solitude. Solitude is simply the state of being apart from others; not everyone who experiences solitude feels lonely. As a subjective emotion, loneliness can be felt even when surrounded by other people; one who feels lonely, is lonely. The causes of loneliness are varied. They include social, mental, emotional, and environmental factors.
- Wikipedia
Today’s society insists that we communicate via e-mail and social media. But face to face, in depth human to human contact is what we require. Accept that fact and do everything in your power to make sure that you are never, ever alone. Your strength is your community.
This is a nice story by Ray Bradbury. It takes you to a point in time. It’s about a life after the insanity of mad kings and corrupt politicians. I do hope that you appreciate this story like I do.
Especially since it takes place in America in the year 2026…
There will come the soft rains
Ray Bradbury
Conclusion
It’s a very short story.
I think that this story stands alone on it’s own merits.
People have forgotten. The American leadership has forgotten what a cold war was, and the threat of any day having your complete life turned upside down by nuclear war. This week, America is going to base it’s nuclear SLBM missile subs in Australia, and Australia agrees to host the systems.
Jesus!
This kind of nuclear-war level posturing is dangerous. On one hand Biden says that “America doesn’t want war”, on the other hand, it was one year after it launched three lethal bio-weapons strains on China. And is placing nuclear weapons in the QUAD that rings the Chinese mainland.
Do they think that the rest of the world is as ignorant as the dumbed-down Americans are?
I guess so.
The United States is a run-away train and it ain’t stopping or slowing down for shit. The final crash is going to be spectacular, and horrific at the same time. This story here describes that aftermath.
RayBradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” tells the story ofahouse that has survived a nuclear blast in the year 2026. Thehouse has automated systems, not unlike a modern-day smarthome. Each day, the house makes the beds, cooks dinner, and throwsoutthe trash—despite the fact that its owners have died.
This post consists of music from the group “Tool”. I was inspired to provide it here after reading a comment on the Forum by Pissed Lizard, who said…
I am opening this up as a general music area because I am VERY seriously interested in all of your music - I have had some people share some seriously moving music.
There is a band called Tool that nobody can really categorize - for those of you who aren’t aware. It’s fans are RABID for some reason and we can pick each other out in crowds - at least here in the states.
I got into a little trouble in my psychiatry years and stumbled upon an old, cranky, narcissistic to the bone neurologist that sort of saw the way things were going and for some reason-intervened. He has passed away since but I mention him because he truly changed my life and our friendship became more meaningful than I ever could imagine. Everyone saw him as a total asshole. GREAT doc - brilliant - just a dick. He was from Ukraine and made sure they got a few CT scanners and MRI’s. He paid for them out of his own pocket. And passed away alone. Lots of family - so close - but alone.
He is connected to my Tool story because one day, out of the clear blue - I was blasting Tool in my car and he needed a ride - but he said he wanted to get me in a functional MRI and see if my brain lit up differently than his when we both listened to the same tool songs. We selected 7 at random and one each for a total of 9 (my Holy number - arbitrary, but - we were messing around.
Sure as shit certain areas of my brain - and take a wild freaking guess which area (pineal gland) lit up like a neon bulb.
He ended up taking that little “hey, let’s mess around with a hospitals toy because America” and turned it into a straight up research project regarding how different visual art lights up different areas in different peoples brains.
I’ll keep his name to myself, because he is a one of many passes souls I love, that, like me, like a bit of privacy. Or as much as we can control. But as much as he was hated - and I hated him as a resident - he became a great, loyal friend to the end.
RIP, brother! I hope you are where you need to be. Frigging hand delivered MRI machines to Ukraine - a legend.
The song he saw me reacting to is called “Vicarious”. What’s funny in the machine - I was lighting up like a Christmas tree - and THAT mother f—er - HE fell asleep!
But Tool has that effect on my brain, I am CERTAIN some of us are wired the same way.
How? And where the hell am I going with this - on THIS forum?
As you all know I am WAY late to the party, so if I am repeating stuff that is old news to you - awesome. PLEASE correct me where I am misunderstanding things because it is the hardest topic I have studied - EVER. But anyway I am studying “vertical” time (per my Mantid buddies and yes I can say this part) so I am studying vertical time and I go down the whole “memory implant” rabbit hole and hit the whole Central Race DNA (HUMAN) template of creation.
So I am there - I take a freaking left turn into holy shit town - to THIS - the hard one - and the topic is pretty much how our DNA responds to vibrations - that quantum physicists are bringing all the way down as far as CERN will let them!
I am telling you - I have a witness - I think he filmed it at the time - suffice to say I was at a concert - SUBSTANCE FREE - people were smoking - it was in Colorado - but I am telling you I felt my DNA changing - and I told my buddy OVER AND OVER it was happening - yet I have no recollection of it. It REALLY freaked the dude out - like bad! But something must have happened.
And this was a couple of years ago before I ever even found MM or quantum physics.
My gut is that Tool also messes with my DNA some how - but in a positive way - only a Tool fan will understand.
But has this happened to any of you and what music btw?
The concert was a Wardruna show BTW. It was the only one in the states that year. And again - I know for a fact I was 100% sober and substance free.
I am very interested to hear if anyone else feels that strongly about their music and if you could, please share a link. I am genuinely interested - even to you lurkers out there (we see you) - please - come contribute!
It got me curious, and so, if anyone wants to check out this music, please feel free to download and enjoy.
The Music
You can download the zipped CD/Albums by clicking on any of the links below…
This is a nice story by Ray Bradbury. As I reread this story, I couldn’t help but relive the “news” that enters my feeds on a daily basis. It sounds so familiar. It’s just hard to believe that this story was written in the 1950’s. I do hope that you appreciate this story like I do.
THE LUGGAGE STORE
Ray Bradbury
It was a very remote thing, when the luggage-store
proprietor heard the news on the night radio, received all the
way from Earth on a light-sound beam. The proprietor felt how
remote it was.
There was going to be a war on Earth.
…
He went out to peer into the sky.
Yes, there it was. Earth, in the evening heavens,
following the sun into the hills. The words on the radio and
that green star were one and the same.
“I don’t believe it,” said the proprietor.
“It’s because you’re not there,” said Father Peregrine,
who had stopped by to pass the time of evening.
“What do you mean, Father?”
“It’s like when I was a boy,” said Father Peregrine. “We
heard about wars in China. But we never believed them. It was
too far away. And there were too many people dying. It
was impossible. Even when we saw the motion pictures we didn’t
believe it. Well, that’s how it is now. Earth is China. It’s so
far away it’s unbelievable. It’s not here. You can’t touch it.
You can’t even see it. All you see is a green light. Two
billion people living on that light? Unbelievable! War? We
don’t hear the explosions.”
“We will,” said the proprietor. “I keep thinking about
all those people that were going to come to Mars this week.
What was it? A hundred thousand or so coming up in the next
month or so. What about _them_ if the war starts?”
“I imagine they’ll turn back. They’ll be needed on Earth.”
“Well,” said the proprietor, “I’d better get my luggage
dusted off. I got a feeling there’ll be a rush sale here any
time.”
“Do you think everyone now on Mars will go back to Earth
if this _is_ the Big War we’ve all been expecting for years?”
“It’s a funny thing, Father, but yes, I think we’ll _all_
go back. I know, we came up here to get away from
things–politics, the atom bomb, war, pressure groups,
prejudice, laws–I know. But it’s still home there. You wait
and see. When the first bomb drops on America the people up
here’ll start thinking. They haven’t been here long enough.
A couple years is all. If they’d been here forty years, it’d
be different, but they got relatives down there, and their
home towns. Me, I can’t believe in Earth any more; I can’t
imagine it much. But I’m old. I don’t count. I might stay on
here.”
“I doubt it.”
“Yes, I guess you’re right.”
They stood on the porch watching the stars. Finally
Father Peregrine pulled some money from his pocket and handed
it to the proprietor. “Come to think of it, you’d better give
me a new valise. My old one’s in pretty bad condition. . . .”
The End
Conclusion
It’s a very short story.
Do you really think that if you were living off in a far away nation, and war broke out on American soil, that you would leave and return to America?
I don’t.
I’m in China. America is thrashing and snarling. It is going bat-shit-crazy and the LAST thing that I want to do is return to that cesspool of greedy ignorant psychopathic monsters.
Never the less, this story was written at a different time, in a different place, and the values reflected in this story has long since disappeared from the world. It’s all gone like whispers and vapor.
This is a nice story by Ray Bradbury. I like it because it reminds me of the treasures of being a kid in the 1960’s / 1970’s. There things that our communities and parents provided for us that are now seemingly absent in America today. But in those days were simply precious treasures. Ray Bradbury captures these ideas and images so well.
Time in Thy Flight
A wind blew the long years away past their hot faces.
The Time Machine stopped.
“Nineteen hundred and twenty-eight,” said Janet. The two boys looked past her.
Mr. Fields stirred. “Remember, you’re here to observe the behavior of these ancient people. Be inquisitive, be intelligent, observe.”
“Yes,” said the girl and the two boys in crisp khaki uniforms. They wore identical haircuts, had identical wristwatches, sandals, and coloring of hair, eyes, teeth, and skin, though they were not related.
“Shh!” said Mr. Fields.
They looked out at a little Illinois town in the spring of the year. A cool mist lay on the early morning streets.
Far down the street a small boy came running in the last light of the marble-cream moon. Somewhere a great clock struck 5 A.M. far away.
Leaving tennis-shoe prints softly in the quiet lawns, the boy stepped near the invisible Time Machine and cried up to a high dark house window.
The house window opened. Another boy crept down the roof to the ground. The two boys ran off with banana-filled mouths into the dark cold morning.
“Follow them,” whispered Mr. Fields. “Study their life patterns.
Quick!”
Janet and William and Robert ran on the cold pavements of spring, visible now, through the slumbering town, through a park. All about, lights flickered, doors clicked, and other children rushed alone or in gasping pairs down a hill to some gleaming blue tracks.
“Here it comes!” The children milled about before dawn. Far down the shining tracks a small light grew seconds later into steaming thunder.
“What is it?” screamed Janet.
“A train, silly, you’ve seen pictures of them!” shouted Robert.
And as the Time Children watched, from the train stepped gigantic gray elephants, steaming the pavements with their mighty waters, lifting question-mark nozzles to the cold morning sky. Cumbrous wagons rolled from the long freight flats, red and gold. Lions roared and paced in boxed darkness.
“Why— this must be a—circus!” Janet trembled.
“You think so? Whatever happened to them?”
“Like Christmas, I guess. Just vanished, long ago.”
Janet looked around. “Oh, it’s awful, isn’t it.”
The boys stood numbed. “It sure is.”
Men shouted in the first faint gleam of dawn. Sleeping cars drew up, dazed faces blinked out at the children. Horses clattered like a great fall of stones on the pavement.
Mr. Fields was suddenly behind the children. “Disgusting, barbaric, keeping animals in cages. If I’d known this was here, I’d never let you come see. This is a terrible ritual.”
“Oh, yes.” But Janet’s eyes were puzzled. “And yet, you know, it’s like a nest of maggots. I want to study it.”
“I don’t know,” said Robert, his eyes darting, his fingers trembling.
“It’s pretty crazy. We might try writing a thesis on it if Mr. Fields says it’s all right …”
Mr. Fields nodded. “I’m glad you’re digging in here, finding motives, studying this horror. All right—we’ll see the circus this afternoon.”
“I think I’m going to be sick,” said Janet.
The Time Machine hummed.
“So that was a circus,” said Janet, solemnly.
The trombone circus died in their ears. The last thing they saw was candy-pink trapeze people whirling while baking powder clowns shrieked and bounded.
“You must admit psychovision’s better,” said Robert slowly.
“All those nasty animal smells, the excitement.” Janet blinked. “That’s bad for children, isn’t it? And those older people seated with the children.
Mothers, fathers, they called them. Oh, that was strange.”
Mr. Fields put some marks in his class grading book.
Janet shook her head numbly. “I want to see it all again. I’ve missed the motives somewhere. I want to make that run across town again in the early morning. The cold air on my face—the sidewalk under my feet—the circus train coming in. Was it the air and the early hour that made the children get up and run to see the train come in? I want to retrace the entire pattern.
Why should they be excited? I feel I’ve missed out on the answer.”
“They all smiled so much,” said William.
“Manic-depressives,” said Robert.
“What are summer vacations? I heard them talk about it.” Janet looked at Mr. Fields.
“They spent their summers racing about like idiots, beating each other up,” replied Mr. Fields seriously.
“I’ll take our State Engineered summers of work for children anytime,” said Robert, looking at nothing, his voice faint.
The Time Machine stopped again.
“The Fourth of July,” announced Mr. Fields. “Nineteen hundred and twenty-eight. An ancient holiday when people blew each other’s fingers off.”
They stood before the same house on the same street but on a soft summer evening. Fire wheels hissed, on front porches laughing children tossed things out that went bang!
“Don’t run!” cried Mr. Fields. “It’s not war, don’t be afraid!”
But Janet’s and Robert’s and William’s faces were pink, now blue, now white with fountains of soft fire.
“We’re all right,” said Janet, standing very still.
“Happily,” announced Mr. Fields, “they prohibited fireworks a century ago, did away with the whole messy explosion.”
Children did fairy dances, weaving their names and destinies on the dark summer air with white sparklers.
“I’d like to do that,” said Janet, softly. “Write my name on the air.
See? I’d like that.”
“What?” Mr. Fields hadn’t been listening.
“Nothing,” said Janet.
“Bang!” whispered William and Robert, standing under the soft summer trees, in shadow, watching, watching the red, white, and green fires on the beautiful summer night lawns. “Bang!”
October.
The Time Machine paused for the last time, an hour later in the month of burning leaves. People bustled into dim houses carrying pumpkins and corn shocks. Skeletons danced, bats flew, candles flamed, apples swung in empty doorways.
“Halloween,” said Mr. Fields. “The acme of horror. This was the age of superstition, you know. Later they banned the Grimm Brothers, ghosts, skeletons, and all that claptrap. You children, thank God, were raised in an antiseptic world of no shadows or ghosts. You had decent holidays like William C. Chatterton’s Birthday, Work Day, and Machine Day.”
They walked by the same house in the empty October night, peering in at the triangle-eyed pumpkins, the masks leering in black attics and damp cellars. Now, inside the house, some party children squatted telling stories, laughing!
“I want to be inside with them,” said Janet at last.
“Sociologically, of course,” said the boys.
“No,” she said.
“What?” asked Mr. Fields.
“No, I just want to be inside, I just want to stay here, I want to see it all and be here and never be anywhere else, I want firecrackers and pumpkins and circuses, I want Christmases and Valentines and Fourths, like we’ve seen.”
“This is getting out of hand …” Mr. Fields started to say.
But suddenly Janet was gone. “Robert, William, come on!” She ran.
The boys leaped after her.
“Hold on!” shouted Mr. Fields. “Robert! William, I’ve got you!” He seized the last boy, but the other escaped. “Janet, Robert—come back here!
You’ll never pass into the seventh grade!
You’ll fail, Janet, Bob— Bob! ”
An October wind blew wildly down the street, vanishing with the children off among moaning trees.
William twisted and kicked.
“No, not you, too, William, you’re coming home with me. We’ll teach those other two a lesson they won’t forget. So they want to stay in the past, do they?” Mr. Fields shouted so everyone could hear. “All right, Janet, Bob, stay in this horror, in this chaos! In a few weeks you’ll come sniveling back here to me. But I’ll be gone! I’m leaving you here to go mad in this world!”
He hurried William to the Time Machine. The boy was sobbing.
“Don’t make me come back here on any more Field Excursions ever again, please, Mr. Fields, please—”
“Shut up!”
Almost instantly the Time Machine whisked away toward the future, toward the underground hive cities, the metal buildings, the metal flowers, the metal lawns.
“Good-bye, Janet, Bob!”
A great cold October wind blew through the town like water. And when it had ceased blowing it had carried all the children, whether invited or uninvited, masked or unmasked, to the doors of houses which closed upon them. There was not a running child anywhere in the night. The wind whined away in the bare treetops.
And inside the big house, in the candlelight, someone was pouring cold apple cider all around, to everyone, no matter who they were.
The End
Conclusion
This story takes me back to a time when things were simpler and reminds me of how precious the moments were that we possessed. Don’t let the preciousness of the moments that you have today slip from your hands.
Whether it is the 1950’s or the 1990’s, or even today. Treasure what you have now. For it is all fleeting….
Oh, I tire of all this anti-China bullshit and all the rest. I just want to live my life in peace and smunch. So here, we are going to digress a spell on something that will “hit you out of left field”…
A Russian simulator.
Who’d figure? Right? There’s some outstanding simulations. One of which is the DF-31 simulator that was developed by one of the MM influencers here. Here’s another one. It’s fun.
Well it is true.
I found this cool and relaxing simulation on a Russian website, HERE, and copied it with my own comments and interjections. All credit to the author, and note that it was edited to fit this venue.
A rural Russian simulator…
Imagine you’re alone in a small wooden hut, not a soul around, only your plot of land, abandoned barns and vast swathes of forest.
.
It’s the closest thing to actually being there.
.
I open my eyes — outside it’s already light. I get out of bed, cover it with a khokhloma throw blanket, admire the dresser with porcelain dinnerware and go downstairs to have breakfast. On the way, I make sure to glance at the candle-lit icon and thank God before tucking in.
It takes you there.
Downstairs, there is a stove and a dining table with a samovar, cherry pie and cabbage pirozhkis. Only, for some reason, I can’t eat them — only pick things up and throw them at the wooden wall.
I really think that there is something really calming about exploring abandoned rural Russia.
There is no TV, let alone a computer, so, out of boredom, I go outside to the sound of birds singing and grasshoppers chirping. On the plot of land, I am greeted by the sight of an empty well, an old barn and the only living creature besides myself — a bull, gazing mournfully into the distance.
This is a description of the video game ‘Симулятор Одиночества В Русской Деревне’ (‘Simulator of Loneliness in a Russian Village’), released by Russian indie developer Flex Entertainment on Steam on April 9, 2021.
It has no monsters (save perhaps for a few rats in the derelict buildings), complex storyline or quests — only an abandoned village in an unknown Russian province and the chance to feel the atmosphere as the sole inhabitant.
“Once there was a bustling life, however, the lack of work, entertainment and generally any prospects forced all the residents to leave.
You are the only one who did not exchange wide fields, dense forests and a morning swim in the river for office work and a dull life in a nine-story panel house. From the point of view of the gameplay, this is a classic walking simulator in recognizable Russian scenery.
Just relax and spend time wandering through the sun-drenched forest and misty swamps, or explore the interiors of the canonical Russian hut, which has realistic graphics and the entire environment is worked out to the smallest detail,” reads the description on the game’s Steam page.
It is, indeed, a classic walking simulator.
The only objective in the game is to explore your own property, study scrawled messages on the walls of the abandoned buildings, or wander through the dense forest, crossing swamps, rivers and small wooden bridges.
If you max up the volume, it might seem you’re not alone in the village — every now and then what seems like footsteps and eerie creaking sounds can be heard.
You can, like your erstwhile neighbors, try to escape to the city, but the mission is impeded by endless forest and no map. You might not even make it back home…
Unsurprisingly, some players complain that the game lacks action — you can’t climb on the stove, drink vodka or go to the banya.
But the developers don’t promise entertainment, just total immersion in the atmosphere of an abandoned Russian backwater.
“The game’s creators highlight the acute topic of the dying Russian countryside, as well as the problem of loneliness and disconnection between people and their own inability and unwillingness to overcome these barriers,” the player by the name of ‘krtdn’ reflects philosophically in his review.
‘Simulator of Loneliness in the Russian Village’ is available on Steam in Russian only for 59 rubles (approx. $0.80).
Do you want more?
I have more articles like this in my Happiness Index here…
This is a nice story by Ray Bradbury.Three hundred years after his death, William Lantry awakes from his coffin. One thing is very clear to him – this sterile world without superstition, fear, or imagination must be destroyed. Ray Bradbury was one of the best-known writers of our time. He was a master storyteller, a champion of creative freedom, and a space-age visionary.
Pillar of Fire
I
He came out of the earth, hating. Hate was his father; hate was his mother.
It was good to walk again. It was good to leap up out of the earth, off of your back, and stretch your cramped arms violently and try to take a deep breath!
He tried. He cried out.
He couldn’t breathe. He flung his arms over his face and tried to breathe. It was impossible. He walked on the earth, he came out of the earth.
But he was dead. He couldn’t breathe. He could take air into his mouth and force it half down his throat, with withered moves of long-dormant muscles, wildly, wildly! And with this little air he could shout and cry! He wanted to have tears, but he couldn’t make them come, either. All he knew was that he was standing upright, he was dead, he shouldn’t be walking! He couldn’t breathe and yet he stood.
The smells of the world were all about him. Frustratedly, he tried to smell the smells of autumn. Autumn was burning the land down into ruin. All across the country the ruins of summer lay; vast forests bloomed with flame, tumbled down timber on empty, unleafed timber. The smoke of the burning was rich, blue, and invisible.
He stood in the graveyard, hating. He walked through the world and yet could not taste nor smell of it. He heard, yes. The wind roared on his newly opened ears. But he was dead. Even though he walked he knew he was dead and should expect not too much of himself or this hateful living world.
He touched the tombstone over his own empty grave. He knew his own name again. It was a good job of carving.
WILLIAM LANTRY
That’s what the gravestone said.
His fingers trembled on the cool stone surface.
BORN 1898—DIED 1933
Born again…?
What year? He glared at the sky and the midnight autumnal stars moving in slow illuminations across the windy black. He read the tiltings of centuries in those stars. Orion thus and so, Aurega here! and where Taurus?
There!
His eyes narrowed. His lips spelled out the year:
“2349.”
An odd number. Like a school sum. They used to say a man couldn’t encompass any number over a hundred. After that it was all so damned abstract there was no use counting. This was the year 2349! A numeral, a sum. And here he was, a man who had lain in his hateful dark coffin, hating to be buried, hating the living people above who lived and lived and lived, hating them for all the centuries, until today, now, born out of hatred, he stood by his own freshly excavated grave, the smell of raw earth in the air, perhaps, but he could not smell it!
“I,” he said, addressing a poplar tree that was shaken by the wind, “am an anachronism.” He smiled faintly.
He looked at the graveyard. It was cold and empty. All of the stones had been ripped up and piled like so many flat bricks, one atop another, in the far corner by the wrought iron fence. This had been going on for two endless weeks. In his deep secret coffin he had heard the heartless, wild stirring as the men jabbed the earth with cold spades and tore out the coffins and carried away the withered ancient bodies to be burned. Twisting with fear in his coffin, he had waited for them to come to him.
Today they had arrived at his coffin. But—late. They had dug down to within an inch of the lid. Five o’clock bell, time for quitting. Home to supper.
The workers had gone off. Tomorrow they would finish the job, they said, shrugging into their coats.
Silence had come to the emptied tombyard.
Carefully, quietly, with a soft rattling of sod, the coffin lid had lifted.
William Lantry stood trembling now, in the last cemetery on Earth.
“Remember?” he asked himself, looking at the raw earth. “Remember those stories of that last man on Earth? Those stories of men wandering in ruins, alone? Well, you, William Lantry, are a switch on the old story. Do you know that? You are the last dead man in the whole world!”
There were no more dead people. Nowhere in any land was there a dead person. Impossible! Lantry did not smile at this. No, not impossible at all in this foolish, sterile, unimaginative, antiseptic age of cleansings and scientific methods! People died, oh my God, yes. But— dead people?
Corpses? They didn’t exist!
What happened to dead people?
The graveyard was on a hill. William Lantry walked through the dark burning night until he reached the edge of the graveyard and looked down upon the new town of Salem. It was all illumination, all color. Rocket ships cut fire above it, crossing the sky to all the far ports of Earth.
In his grave the new violence of this future world had driven down and seeped into William Lantry. He had been bathed in it for years. He knew all about it, with a hating dead man’s knowledge of such things.
Most important of all, he knew what these fools did with dead men.
He lifted his eyes. In the center of the town a massive stone finger pointed at the stars. It was three hundred feet high and fifty feet across. There was a wide entrance and a drive in front of it.
In the town, theoretically, thought William Lantry, say you have a dying man. In a moment he will be dead. What happens? No sooner is his pulse cold when a certificate is flourished, made out, his relatives pack him into a car-beetle and drive him swiftly to—
The Incinerator!
That functional finger, that Pillar of Fire pointing at the stars.
Incinerator. A functional, terrible name. But truth is truth in this future world.
Like a stick of kindling your Mr. Dead Man is shot into the furnace.
Flume!
William Lantry looked at the top of the gigantic pistol shoving at the stars. A small pennant of smoke issued from the top.
There’s where your dead people go.
“Take care of yourself, William Lantry,” he murmured. “You’re the last one, the rare item, the last dead man. All the other graveyards of Earth have been blasted up. This is the last graveyard and you’re the last dead man from the centuries. These people don’t believe in having dead people about, much less walking dead people. Everything that can’t be used goes up like a matchstick. Superstitions right along with it!”
He looked at the town. All right, he thought, quietly, I hate you. You hate me, or you would if you knew I existed. You don’t believe in such things as vampires or ghosts. Labels without referents, you cry! You snort. All right, snort! Frankly, I don’t believe in you, either! I don’t like you! You and your Incinerators.
He trembled. How very close it had been. Day after day they had hauled out the other dead ones, burned them like so much kindling. An edict had been broadcast around the world. He had heard the digging men talk as they worked!
“I guess it’s a good idea, this cleaning up the graveyards,” said one of the men.
“Guess so,” said another. “Grisly custom. Can you imagine? Being buried, I mean! Unhealthy! All them germs!”
“Sort of a shame. Romantic, kind of. I mean, leaving just this one graveyard untouched all these centuries. The other graveyards were cleaned out, what year was it, Jim?”
“About 2260, I think. Yeah, that was it, 2260, almost a hundred years ago. But some Salem Committee, they got on their high horse and they said,
‘Look here, let’s have just one graveyard left, to remind us of the customs of the barbarians.’ And the government scratched its head, thunk it over, and said, ‘Okay. Salem it is. But all other graveyards go, you understand, all!’”
“And away they went,” said Jim.
“Sure, they sucked out ’em with fire and steam shovels and rocket-cleaners. If they knew a man was buried in a cow pasture, they fixed him!
Evacuated them, they did. Sort of cruel, I say.”
“I hate to sound old-fashioned,but still there were a lot of tourists came here every year, just to see what a real graveyard was like.”
“Right. We had nearly a million people in the last three years visiting.
A good revenue. But—a government order is an order. The government says no more morbidity, so flush her out we do! Here we go. Hand me that spade, Bill.”
William Lantry stood in the autumn wind, on the hill. It was good to walk again, to feel the wind and to hear the leaves scuttling like mice on the road ahead of him. It was good to see the bitter cold stars almost blown away by the wind.
It was even good to know fear again.
For fear rose in him now, and he could not put it away. The very fact that he was walking made him an enemy. And there was not another friend, another dead man, in all of the world, to whom one could turn for help or consolation. It was the whole melodramatic living world against one. William Lantry. It was the whole vampire-disbelieving, body-burning, graveyard-annihilating world against a man in a dark suit on a dark autumn hill. He put out his pale cold hands into the city illumination. You have pulled the tombstones, like teeth, from the yard, he thought. Now I will find some way to push your Incinerators down into rubble. I will make dead people again, and I will make friends in so doing. I cannot be alone and lonely. I must start manufacturing friends very soon. Tonight.
“War is declared,” he said, and laughed. It was pretty silly, one man declaring war on an entire world.
The world did not answer back. A rocket crossed the sky on a rush of flame, like an Incinerator taking wing.
Footsteps. Lantry hastened to the edge of the cemetery. The diggers, coming back to finish up their work? No. Just someone, a man, walking by.
As the man came abreast the cemetery gate, Lantry stepped swiftly out. “Good evening,” said the man, smiling.
Lantry struck the man in the face. The man fell. Lantry bent quietly down and hit the man a killing blow across the neck with the side of his hand.
Dragging the body back into shadow, he stripped it and changed clothes with it. It wouldn’t do for a fellow to go wandering about this future world with ancient clothing on. He found a small pocket knife in the man’s coat; not much of a knife, but enough if you knew how to handle it properly.
He knew how.
He rolled the body down into one of the already opened and exhumed graves. In a minute he had shoveled dirt down upon it, just enough to hide it.
There was little chance of it being found. They wouldn’t dig the same grave twice.
He adjusted himself in his new loose-fitting metallic suit. Fine, fine.
Hating. William Lantry walked down into town, to do battle with the Earth.
II
The Incinerator was open. It never closed. There was a wide entrance, all lighted up with hidden illumination, there was a helicopter landing table and a beetle drive. The town itself was dying down after another day of the dynamo. The lights were going dim, and the only quiet, lighted spot in the town now was the Incinerator. God, what a practical name, what an unromantic name.
William Lantry entered the wide, well-lighted door. It was an entrance, really; there were no doors to open or shut. People could go in and out, summer or winter, the inside was always warm. Warm from the fire that rushed whispering up the high round flue to where the whirlers, the propellors, the air jets pushed the leafy gray ashes on away for a ten-mile ride down the sky.
There was the warmth of the bakery here. The halls were floored with rubber parquet. You couldn’t make a noise if you wanted to. Music played in hidden throats somewhere. Not music of death at all, but music of life and the way the sun lived inside the Incinerator; or the sun’s brother, anyway. You could hear the flame floating inside the heavy brick wall.
William Lantry descended a ramp. Behind him he heard a whisper and turned in time to see a beetle stop before the entranceway. A bell rang. The music, as if at a signal, rose to ecstatic heights. There was joy in it.
From the beetle, which opened from the rear, some attendants stepped carrying a golden box. It was six feet long and there were sun symbols on it.
From another beetle the relatives of the man in the box stepped and followed as the attendants took the golden box down a ramp to a kind of altar. On the side of the altar were the words, “WE THAT WERE BORN OF THE SUN RETURN TO THE SUN.” The golden box was deposited upon the altar, the music leaped upward, the Guardian of this place spoke only a few words, then the attendants picked up the golden box, walked to a transparent wall, a safety lock, also transparent, and opened it. The box was shoved into the glass slot.
A moment later an inner lock opened, the box was injected into the interior of the flue, and vanished instantly in quick flame.
The attendants walked away. The relatives without a word turned and walked out. The music played.
William Lantry approached the glass fire lock. He peered through the wall at the vast, glowing never-ceasing heart of the Incinerator. It burned steadily, without a flicker, singing to itself peacefully. It was so solid it was like a golden river flowing up out of the earth toward the sky. Anything you put into the river was borne upward, vanished.
Lantry felt again his unreasoning hatred of this thing, this monster, cleansing fire.
A man stood at his elbow. “May I help you, sir?”
“What?” Lantry turned abruptly. “What did you say?”
“May I be of service?”
“I—that is—” Lantry looked quickly at the ramp and the door. His hands trembled at his sides. “I’ve never been in here before.”
“Never?” The Attendant was surprised.
That had been the wrong thing to say, Lantry realized. But it was said, nevertheless. “I mean,” he said. “Not really. I mean, when you’re a child, somehow, you don’t pay attention. I suddenly realized tonight that I didn’t really know the Incinerator.”
The Attendant smiled. “We never know anything, do we, really? I’ll be glad to show you around.”
“Oh, no. Never mind. It—it’s a wonderful place.”
“Yes, it is.” The Attendant took pride in it. “One of the finest in the world, I think.”
“I—” Lantry felt he must explain further. “I haven’t had many relatives die on me since I was a child. In fact, none. So, you see I haven’t been here for many years.”
“I see.” The Attendant’s face seemed to darken somewhat.
What’ve I said now, thought Lantry. What in God’s name is wrong?
What’ve I done? If I’m not careful I’ll get myself shoved right into that monstrous firetrap. What’s wrong with this fellow’s face? He seems to be giving me more than the usual going-over.
“You wouldn’t be one of the men who’ve just returned from Mars, would you?” asked the Attendant.
“No. Why do you ask?”
“No matter.” The Attendant began to walk off. “If you want to know anything, just ask me.”
“Just one thing,” said Lantry.
“What’s that?”
“This.”
Lantry dealt him a stunning blow across the neck.
He had watched the fire-trap operator with expert eyes. Now, with the sagging body in his arms, he touched the button that opened the warm outer lock, placed the body in, heard the music rise, and saw the inner lock open.
The body shot out into the river of fire. The music softened.
“Well done, Lantry, well done.”
Barely an instant later another Attendant entered the room. Lantry was caught with an expression of pleased excitement on his face. The Attendant looked around as if expecting to find someone, then he walked toward Lantry.
“May I help you?”
“Just looking,” said Lantry.
“Rather late at night,” said the Attendant.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
That was the wrong answer, too. Everybody slept in this world.
Nobody had insomnia. If you did you simply turned on a hypnoray, and, sixty seconds later, you were snoring. Oh, he was just full of wrong answers. First he had made the fatal error of saying he had never been in the Incinerator before, when he knew that all children were brought here on tours, every year, from the time they were four, to instill the idea of the clean fire death and the Incinerator in their minds. Death was a bright fire, death was warmth and the sun. It was not a dark, shadowed thing. That was important in their education.
And he, pale, thoughtless fool, had immediately gabbled out his ignorance.
And another thing, this paleness of his. He looked at his hands and realized with growing terror that a pale man also was nonexistent in this world. They would suspect his paleness. That was why the first attendant had asked, “Are you one of those men newly returned from Mars?” Here, now, this new Attendant was clean and bright as a copper penny, his cheeks red with health and energy. Lantry hid his pale hands in his pockets. But he was finally aware of the searching the Attendant did on his face.
“I mean to say,” said Lantry, “I didn’t want to sleep. I wanted to think.”
“Was there a service held here a moment ago?” asked the Attendant, looking about.
“I don’t know, I just came in.”
“I thought I heard the fire lock open and shut.”
“I don’t know,” said Lantry.
The man pressed a wall button. “Anderson?”
A voice replied. “Yes.”
“Locate Saul for me, will you?”
“I’ll ring the corridors.” A pause. “Can’t find him.”
“Thanks.” The Attendant was puzzled. He was beginning to make little sniffing motions with his nose. “Do you— smell anything?”
Lantry sniffed. “No. Why?”
“I smell something.”
Lantry took hold of the knife in his pocket. He waited.
“I remember once when I was a kid,” said the man. “And we found a cow lying dead in the field. It had been there two days in the hot sun. That’s what this smell is. I wonder what it’s from?”
“Oh, I know what it is,” said Lantry quietly. He held out his hand.
“Here.”
“What?”
“Me, of course.”
“You?”
“Dead several hundred years.”
“You’re an odd joker.” The Attendant was puzzled.
“Very.” Lantry took out the knife. “Do you know what this is?”
“A knife.”
“Do you ever use knives on people any more?”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean—killing them, with knives or guns or poison?”
“You are an odd joker!” The man giggled awkwardly.
“I’m going to kill you,” said Lantry.
“Nobody kills anybody,” said the man.
“Not any more they don’t. But they used to, in the old days.”
“I know they did.”
“This will be the first murder in three hundred years. I just killed your friend. I just shoved him into the fire lock.”
That remark had the desired effect. It numbed the man so completely, it shocked him so thoroughly with its illogical aspects that Lantry had time to walk forward. He put the knife against the man’s chest. “I’m going to kill you.”
“That’s silly,” said the man, numbly. “People don’t do that.”
“Like this,” said Lantry. “You see?”
The knife slid into the chest. The man stared at it for a moment.
Lantry caught the falling body.
III
The Salem flue exploded at six that morning. The great fire chimney shattered into ten thousand parts and flung itself into the earth and into the sky and into the houses of the sleeping people. There was fire and sound, more fire than autumn made burning in the hills.
William Lantry was five miles away at the time of the explosion. He saw the town ignited by the great spreading cremation of it. And he shook his head and laughed a little bit and clapped his hands smartly together.
Relatively simple. You walked around killing people who didn’t believe in murder, had only heard of it indirectly as some dim gone custom of the old barbarian races. You walked into the control room of the Incinerator and said, “How do you work this Incinerator?” and the control man told you, because everybody told the truth in this world of the future, nobody lied, there was no reason to lie, there was no danger to lie against. There was only one criminal in the world, and nobody knew HE existed yet.
Oh, it was an incredibly beautiful setup. The Control Man had told him just how the Incinerator worked, what pressure gauges controlled the flood of fire gases going up the flue, what levers were adjusted or readjusted.
He and Lantry had had quite a talk. It was an easy, free world. People trusted people. A moment later Lantry had shoved a knife in the Control Man also and set the pressure gauges for an overload to occur half an hour later, and walked out of the Incinerator halls, whistling.
Now even the sky was palled with the vast black cloud of the explosion.
“This is only the first,” said Lantry, looking at the sky. “I’ll tear all the others down before they even suspect there’s an unethical man loose in their society. They can’t account for a variable like me. I’m beyond their understanding. I’m incomprehensible, impossible, therefore I do not exist. My God, I can kill hundreds of thousands of them before they even realize murder is out in the world again. I can make it look like an accident each time. Why, the idea is so huge, it’s unbelievable!”
The fire burned the town. He sat under a tree for a long time, until morning. Then, he found a cave in the hills, and went in, to sleep.
He awoke at sunset with a sudden dream of fire. He saw himself pushed into the flue, cut into sections by flame, burned away to nothing. He sat up on the cave floor, laughing at himself. He had an idea.
He walked down into the town and stepped into an audio booth. He dialed OPERATOR. “Give me the Police Department,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?” said the operator.
He tried again. “The Law Force,” he said.
“I will connect you with the Peace Control,” she said, at last.
A little fear began ticking inside him like a tiny watch. Suppose the operator recognized the term Police Department as an anachronism, took his audio number, and sent someone out to investigate? No, she wouldn’t do that.
Why should she suspect? Paranoids were nonexistent in this civilization.
“Yes, the Peace Control,” he said.
A buzz. A man’s voice answered. “Peace Control. Stephens speaking.”
“Give me the Homicide Detail,” said Lantry, smiling.
“The what? ”
“Who investigates murders?”
“I beg your pardon, what are you talking about?”
“Wrong number.” Lantry hung up, chuckling. Ye gods, there was no such a thing as a Homicide Detail. There were no murders, therefore they needed no detectives. Perfect, perfect!
The audio rang back. Lantry hesitated, then answered.
“Say,” said the voice on the phone. “Who are you?”
“The man just left who called,” said Lantry, and hung up again.
He ran. They would recognize his voice and perhaps send someone out to check. People didn’t lie. He had just lied. They knew his voice. He had lied. Anybody who lied needed a psychiatrist. They would come to pick him up to see why he was lying. For no other reason. They suspected him of nothing else. Therefore—he must run.
Oh, how very carefully he must act from now on. He knew nothing of this world, this odd straight truthful ethical world. Simply by looking pale you were suspect. Simply by not sleeping nights you were suspect. Simply by not bathing, by smelling like a—dead cow?—you were suspect. Anything.
He must go to a library. But that was dangerous, too. What were libraries like today? Did they have books or did they have film spools which projected books on a screen? Or did people have libraries at home, thus eliminating the necessity of keeping large main libraries?
He decided to chance it. His use of archaic terms might well make him suspect again, but now it was very important he learn all that could be learned of this foul world into which he had come again. He stopped a man on the street. “Which way to the library?”
The man was not surprised. “Two blocks east, one block north.”
“Thank you.”
Simple as that.
He walked into the library a few minutes later.
“May I help you?”
He looked at the librarian. May I help you, may I help you. What a world of helpful people! “I’d like to ‘have’ Edgar Allan Poe.” His verb was carefully chosen. He didn’t say ‘read.’ He was too afraid that books were passé, that printing itself was a lost art. Maybe all ‘books’ today were in the form of fully delineated three-dimensional motion pictures. How in blazes could you make a motion picture out of Socrates, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud?
“What was that name again?”
“Edgar Allan Poe.”
“There is no such author listed in our files.”
“Will you please check?”
She checked. “Oh, yes. There’s a red mark on the file card. He was one of the authors in the Great Burning of 2265.
“How ignorant of me.”
“That’s all right,” she said. “Have you heard much of him?”
“He had some interesting barbarian ideas on death,” said Lantry.
“Horrible ones,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Ghastly.”
“Yes. Ghastly. Abominable, in fact. Good thing he was burned.
Unclean. By the way, do you have any of Lovecraft?”
“Is that a sex book?”
Lantry exploded with laughter. “No, no. It’s a man.”
She riffled the file. “He was burned, too. Along with Poe.”
“I suppose that applies to Machen and a man named Derleth and one named Ambrose Bierce, also?”
“Yes.” She shut the file cabinet. “All burned. And good riddance.” She gave him an odd warm look of interest. “I bet you’ve just come back from Mars.”
“Why do you say that?”
“There was another explorer in here yesterday. He’d just made the Mars hop and return. He was interested in supernatural literature, also. It seems there are actually ‘tombs’ on Mars.”
“What are ‘tombs’?” Lantry was learning to keep his mouth closed.
“You know, those things they once buried people in.”
“Barbarian custom. Ghastly!”
“Isn’t it? Well, seeing the Martian tombs made this young explorer curious. He came and asked if we had any of those authors you mentioned. Of course we haven’t even a smitch of their stuff.” She looked at his pale face.
“You are one of the Martian rocket men, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” he said. “Got back on the ship the other day.”
“The other young man’s name was Burke.”
“Of course. Burke! Good friend of mine!”
“Sorry I can’t help you. You’d best get yourself some vitamin shots and some sun lamps. You look terrible, Mr.—?”
“Lantry. I’ll be good. Thanks ever so much. See you next Hallows’
Eve!”
“Aren’t you the clever one.” She laughed. “If there were a Hallows’
Eve, I’d make it a date.”
“But they burned that, too,” he said.
“Oh, they burned everything,” she said. “Good night.”
“Good night.” And he went on out.
Oh, how carefully he was balanced in this world! Like some kind of dark gyroscope, whirling with never a murmur, a very silent man. As he walked along the eight o’clock evening street he noticed with particular interest that there was not an unusual amount of lights about. There were the usual street lights at each corner, but the blocks themselves were only faintly illuminated. Could it be that these remarkable people were not afraid of the dark? Incredible nonsense! Every one was afraid of the dark. Even he himself had been afraid, as a child. It was as natural as eating.
A little boy ran by on pelting feet, followed by six others. They yelled and shouted and rolled on the dark cool October lawn, in the leaves. Lantry looked on for several minutes before addressing himself to one of the small boys who was for a moment taking a respite, gathering his breath into his small lungs, as a boy might blow to refill a punctured paper bag.
“Here, now,” said Lantry. “You’ll wear yourself out.”
“Sure,” said the boy.
“Could you tell me,” said the man, “why there are no street lights in the middle of the blocks?”
“Why?” asked the boy.
“I’m a teacher, I thought I’d test your knowledge,” said Lantry.
“Well,” said the boy, “you don’t need lights in the middle of the block, that’s why.”
“But it gets rather dark,” said Lantry.
“So?” said the boy.
“Aren’t you afraid?” asked Lantry.
“Of what?” asked the boy.
“The dark,” said Lantry.
“Ho ho,” said the boy. “Why should I be?”
“Well,” said Lantry. “It’s black, it’s dark. And after all, street lights were invented to take away the dark and take away fear.”
“That’s silly. Street lights were made so you could see where you were walking. Outside of that there’s nothing.”
“You miss the whole point—” said Lantry. “Do you mean to say you would sit in the middle of an empty lot all night and not be afraid?”
“Of what?”
“Of what, of what, of what, you little ninny! Of the dark!”
“Ho ho.”
“Would you go out in the hills and stay all night in the dark?”
“Sure.”
“Would you stay in a deserted house alone?”
“Sure.”
“And not be afraid?”
“Sure.”
“You’re a liar!”
“Don’t you call me nasty names!” shouted the boy. Liar was the improper noun, indeed. It seemed to be the worst thing you could call a person.
Lantry was completely furious with the little monster. “Look,” he insisted. “Look into my eyes …”
The boy looked.
Lantry bared his teeth slightly. He put out his hands, making a clawlike gesture. He leered and gesticulated and wrinkled his face into a terrible mask of horror.
“Ho ho,” said the boy. “You’re funny.”
“What did you say?”
“You’re funny. Do it again. Hey, gang, c’mere! This man does funny things!”
“Never mind.”
“Do it again, sir.”
“Never mind, never mind. Good night!” Lantry ran off.
“Good night, sir. And mind the dark, sir!” called the little boy.
Of all the stupidity, of all the rank, gross, crawling, jelly-mouthed stupidity! He had never seen the like of it in his life! Bringing the children up without so much as an ounce of imagination! Where was the fun in being children if you didn’t imagine things?
He stopped running. He slowed and for the first time began to appraise himself. He ran his hand over his face and bit his fingers and found that he himself was standing midway in the block and he felt uncomfortable. He moved up to the street corner where there was a glowing lantern. “That’s better,” he said, holding his hands out like a man to an open warm fire.
He listened. There was not a sound except the night breathing of the crickets. Finally there was a fire-hush as a rocket swept the sky. It was the sound a torch might make brandished gently on the dark air.
He listened to himself and for the first time he realized what there was so peculiar to himself. There was not a sound in him. The little nostril and lung noises were absent. His lungs did not take nor give oxygen or carbon dioxide; they did not move. The hairs in his nostrils did not quiver with warm combing air. That faint purling whisper of breathing did not sound in his nose.
Strange. Funny. A noise you never heard when you were alive, the breath that fed your body, and yet, once dead, oh how you missed it!
The only other time you ever heard it was on deep dreamless awake nights when you wakened and listened and heard first your nose taking and gently poking out the air, and then the dull deep dim red thunder of the blood in your temples, in your eardrums, in your throat, in your aching wrists, in your warm loins, in your chest. All of those little rhythms, gone. The wrist beat gone, the throat pulse gone, the chest vibration gone. The sound of the blood coming up down around and through, up down around and through.
Now it was like listening to a statue.
And yet he lived. Or, rather, moved about. And how was this done, over and above scientific explanations, theories, doubts?
By one thing, and one thing alone.
Hatred.
Hatred was a blood in him, it went up down around and through, up down around and through. It was a heart in him, not beating, true, but warm.
He was—what? Resentment. Envy. They said he could not lie any longer in his coffin in the cemetery. He had wanted to. He had never had any particular desire to get up and walk around. It had been enough, all these centuries, to lie in the deep box and feel but not feel the ticking of the million insect watches in the earth around, the moves of worms like so many deep thoughts in the soil.
But then they had come and said, “Out you go and into the furnace!”
And that is the worst thing you can say to any man. You cannot tell him what to do. If you say you are dead, he will want not to be dead. If you say there are no such things as vampires, by God, that man will try to be one just for spite. If you say a dead man cannot walk, he will test his limbs. If you say murder is no longer occurring, he will make it occur. He was, in toto, all the impossible things. They had given birth to him with their practices and ignorances. Oh, how wrong they were. They needed to be shown. He would show them! Sun is good, so is night, there is nothing wrong with dark, they said.
Dark is horror, he shouted, silently, facing the little houses. It is meant for contrast. You must fear, you hear! That has always been the way of this world. You destroyers of Edgar Allan Poe and fine big-worded Lovecraft, you burner of Halloween masks and destroyer of pumpkin jack-o-lanterns! I will make night what it once was, the thing against which man built all his lanterned cities and his many children!
As if in answer to this, a rocket, flying low, trailing a long rakish feather of flame. It made Lantry flinch and draw back.
IV
It was but ten miles to the little town of Science Port. He made it by dawn, walking. But even this was not good. At four in the morning a silver beetle pulled up on the road beside him.
“Hello,” called the man inside.
“Hello,” said Lantry, wearily.
“Why are you walking?” asked the man.
“I’m going to Science Port.”
“Why don’t you ride?”
“I like to walk.”
“Nobody likes to walk. Are you sick? May I give you a ride?”
“Thanks, but I like to walk.”
The man hesitated, then closed the beetle door. “Good night.”
When the beetle was gone over the hill, Lantry retreated into a nearby forest. A world full of bungling, helping people. By God, you couldn’t even walk without being accused of sickness. That meant only one thing. He must not walk any longer, he had to ride. He should have accepted that fellow’s offer.
The rest of the night he walked far enough off the highway so that if a beetle rushed by he had time to vanish in the underbrush. At dawn he crept into an empty dry water drain and closed his eyes.
The dream was as perfect as a rimed snowflake.
He saw the graveyard where he had lain deep and ripe over the centuries. He heard the early morning footsteps of the laborers returning to finish their work.
“Would you mind passing me the shovel, Jim?”
“Here you go.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute!”
“What’s up?”
“Look here. We didn’t finish last night, did we?”
“No.”
There was one more coffin, wasn’t there?”
“Yes.”
“Well, here it is, and open!”
“You’ve got the wrong hole.”
“What’s the name say on the gravestone?”
“Lantry. William Lantry.”
“That’s him, that’s the one! Gone!”
“What could have happened to it?”
“How do I know. The body was here last night.”
“We can’t be sure, we didn’t look.”
“God man, people don’t bury empty coffins. He was in his box. Now he isn’t.”
“Maybe this box was empty.”
“Nonsense. Smell that smell? He was here all right.”
A pause.
“Nobody would have taken the body, would they?”
“What for?”
“A curiosity, perhaps.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. People just don’t steal. Nobody steals.”
“Well, then, there’s only one solution.”
“And?”
“He got up and walked away.”
A pause. In the dark dream, Lantry expected to hear laughter. There was none. Instead, the voice of the grave-digger, after a thoughtful pause, said, “Yes. That’s it, indeed. He got up and walked away.”
“That’s interesting to think about,” said the other.
“Isn’t it, though!”
Silence.
Lantry awoke. It had all been a dream, but, how realistic. How strangely the two men had carried on. But not unnaturally, oh, no. That was exactly how you expected men of the future to talk. Men of the future. Lantry grinned wryly. That was an anachronism for you. This was the future. This was happening now. It wasn’t three hundred years from now, it was now, not then, or any other time. This wasn’t the twentieth century. Oh, how calmly those two men in the dream had said, “He got up and walked away.” “—
interesting to think about.” “Isn’t it, though?” With never a quaver in their voices. With not so much as a glance over their shoulders or a tremble of spade in hand. But, of course, with their perfectly honest, logical minds, there was but one explanation; certainly nobody had stolen the corpse. “Nobody steals.” The corpse had simply got up and walked off. The corpse was the only one who could have possibly moved the corpse. By the few casual slow words of the gravediggers Lantry knew what they were thinking. Here was a man that had lain in suspended animation, not really dead, for hundreds of years. The jarring about, the activity, had brought him back.
Everyone had heard of those little green toads that are sealed for centuries inside mud rocks or in ice patties, alive, alive oh! And how when scientists chipped them out and warmed them like marbles in their hands the little toads leapt about and frisked and blinked. Then it was only logical that the gravediggers think of William Lantry in like fashion.
But what if the various parts were fitted together in the next day or so?
If the vanished body and the shattered, exploded Incinerator were connected?
What if this fellow named Burke, who had returned pale from Mars, went to the library again and said to the young woman he wanted some books and she said, “Oh, your friend Lantry was in the other day.” And he’d say, ‘Lantry who? Don’t know anyone by that name.’ And she’d say, “Oh, he lied.” And people in this time didn’t lie. So it would all form and coalesce, item by item, bit by bit. A pale man who was pale and shouldn’t be pale had lied and people don’t lie, and a walking man on a lonely country road had walked and people don’t walk any more, and a body was missing from a cemetery, and the Incinerator had blown up and and and—
They would come after him. They would find him. He would be easy to find. He walked. He lied. He was pale. They would find him and take him and stick him through the open fire lock of the nearest Burner and that would be your Mr. William Lantry, like a Fourth of July set-piece!
There was only one thing to be done efficiently and completely. He arose in violent moves. His lips were wide and his dark eyes were flared and there was a trembling and burning all through him. He must kill and kill and kill and kill and kill. He must make his enemies into friends, into people like himself who walked but shouldn’t walk, who were pale in a land of pinks. He must kill and then kill and then kill again. He must make bodies and dead people and corpses. He must destroy Incinerator after Flue after Burner after Incinerator. Explosion on explosion. Death on death. Then, when the Incinerators were all in thrown ruin, and the hastily established morgues were jammed with the bodies of people shattered by the explosion, then he would begin his making of friends, his enrollment of the dead in his own cause.
Before they traced and found and killed him, they must be killed themselves. So far he was safe. He could kill and they would not kill back.
People simply do not go around killing. That was his safety margin. He climbed out of the abandoned drain, stood in the road.
He took the knife from his pocket and hailed the next beetle.
It was like the Fourth of July! The biggest firecracker of them all. The Science Port Incinerator split down the middle and flew apart. It made a thousand small explosions that ended with a greater one. It fell upon the town and crushed houses and burned trees. It woke people from sleep and then put them to sleep again, forever, an instant later.
William Lantry, sitting in a beetle that was not his own, tuned idly to a station on the audio dial. The collapse of the Incinerator had killed some four hundred people. Many had been caught in flattened houses, others struck by flying metal. A temporary morgue was being set up at—
An address was given.
Lantry noted it with a pad and pencil.
He could go on this way, he thought, from town to town, from country to country, destroying the Burners, the Pillars of Fire, until the whole clean magnificent framework of flame and cauterization was tumbled. He made a fair estimate—each explosion averaged five hundred dead. You could work that up to a hundred thousand in no time.
He pressed the floor stud on the beetle. Smiling, he drove off through the dark streets of the city.
The city coroner had requisitioned an old warehouse. From midnight until four in the morning the gray beetles hissed down the rain-shiny streets, turned in, and the bodies were laid out on the cold concrete floors, with white sheets over them. It was a continuous flow until about four-thirty, then it stopped. There were about two hundred bodies there, white and cold.
The bodies were left alone; nobody stayed behind to tend them. There was no use tending the dead; it was a useless procedure; the dead could take care of themselves.
About five o’clock, with a touch of dawn in the east, the first trickle of relatives arrived to identify their sons or their fathers or their mothers or their uncles. The people moved quickly into the warehouse, made the identification, moved quickly out again. By six o’clock, with the sky still lighter in the east, this trickle had passed on, also.
William Lantry walked across the wide wet street and entered the warehouse.
He held a piece of blue chalk in one hand.
He walked by the coroner who stood in the entranceway talking to two others. “… drive the bodies to the Incinerator in Mellin Town, tomorrow …”
The voices faded.
Lantry moved, his feet echoing faintly on the cool concrete. A wave of sourceless relief came to him as he walked among the shrouded figures. He was among his own. And—better than that! He had created these! He had made them dead! He had procured for himself a vast number of recumbent friends!
Was the coroner watching? Lantry turned his head. No. The warehouse was calm and quiet and shadowed in the dark morning. The coroner was walking away now; across the street, with his two attendants; a beetle had drawn up on the other side of the street, and the coroner was going over to talk with whoever was in the beetle.
William Lantry stood and made a blue chalk pentagram on the floor by each of the bodies. He moved swiftly, swiftly, without a sound, without blinking. In a few minutes, glancing up now and then to see if the coroner was still busy, he had chalked the floor by a hundred bodies. He straightened up and put the chalk in his pocket.
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party, now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party, now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party, now is the time …
Lying in the earth, over the centuries, the processes and thoughts of passing peoples and passing times had seeped down to him, slowly, as into a deep-buried sponge. From some death-memory in him now, ironically, repeatedly, a black typewriter clacked out black even lines of pertinent words: Now is the time for all good men, for all good men, to come to the aid of—
William Lantry.
Other words—
Arise my love, and come away—
The quick brown fox jumped over … Paraphrase it. The quick risen body jumped over the tumbled Incinerator…
Lazarus, come forth from the tomb …
He knew the right words. He need only speak them as they had been spoken over the centuries. He need only gesture with his hands and speak the words, the dark words that would cause these bodies to quiver, rise and walk!
And when they had risen he would take them through the town, they would kill others, and the others would rise and walk. By the end of the day there would be thousands of good friends, walking with him. And what of the naïve, living people of this year, this day, this hour? They would be completely unprepared for it. They would go down to defeat because they would not be expecting war of any sort. They wouldn’t believe it possible, it would all be over before they could convince themselves that such an illogical thing could happen.
He lifted his hands. His lips moved. He said the words. He began in a chanting whisper and then raised his voice, louder. He said the words again and again. His eyes were closed tightly. His body swayed. He spoke faster and faster. He began to move forward among the bodies. The dark words flowed from his mouth. He was enchanted with his own formulae. He stooped and made further blue symbols on the concrete, in the fashion of long-dead sorcerers, smiling, confident. Any moment now the first tremor of the still bodies, any moment now the rising, the leaping up of the cold ones!
His hands lifted in the air. His head nodded. He spoke, he spoke, he spoke. He gestured. He talked loudly over the bodies, his eyes flaring, his body tensed. “Now!” he cried, violently. “Rise, all of you!”
Nothing happened.
“Rise!” he screamed, with a terrible torment in his voice.
The sheets lay in white blue-shadow folds over the silent bodies.
“Hear me, and act!” he shouted.
Far away, on the street, a beetle hissed along.
Again, again, again he shouted, pleaded. He got down by each body and asked of it his particular violent favor. No reply. He strode wildly between the even white rows, flinging his arms up, stooping again and again to make blue symbols!
Lantry was very pale. He licked his lips. “Come on, get up,” he said.
“They have, they always have, for a thousand years. When you make a mark
—so! and speak a word—so! they always rise! Why not now, why not you!
Come on, come on, before they come back!”
The warehouse went up into shadow. There were steel beams across and down. In it, under the roof, there was not a sound, except the raving of a lonely man.
Lantry stopped.
Through the wide doors of the warehouse he caught a glimpse of the last cold stars of morning.
This was the year 2349.
His eyes grew cold and his hands fell to his sides. He did not move.
Once upon a time people shuddered when they heard the wind about the house, once people raised crucifixes and wolfbane, and believed in walking dead and bats and loping white wolves. And as long as they believed, then so long did the dead, the bats, the loping wolves exist. The mind gave birth and reality to them.
But …
He looked at the white sheeted bodies.
These people did not believe.
They had never believed. They would never believe. They had never imagined that the dead might walk. The dead went up flues in flame. They had never heard superstition, never trembled or shuddered or doubted in the dark. Walking dead people could not exist, they were illogical. This was the year 2349, man, after all!
Therefore, these people could not rise, could not walk again. They were dead and flat and cold. Nothing, chalk, imprecation, superstition, could wind them up and set them walking. They were dead and knew they were dead!
He was alone.
There were live people in the world who moved and drove beetles and drank quiet drinks in little dimly illumined bars by country roads, and kissed women and talked much good talk all day and every day.
But he was not alive.
Friction gave him what little warmth he possessed.
There were two hundred dead people here in this warehouse now, cold upon the floor. The first dead people in a hundred years who were allowed to be corpses for an extra hour or more. The first not to be immediately trundled to the Incinerator and lit like so much phosphorus.
He should be happy with them, among them.
He was not.
They were completely dead. They did not know nor believe in walking once the heart had paused and stilled itself. They were deader than dead ever was.
He was indeed alone, more alone than any man had ever been. He felt the chill of his aloneness moving up into his chest, strangling him quietly.
William Lantry turned suddenly and gasped.
While he had stood there, someone had entered the warehouse. A tall man with white hair, wearing a light weight tan overcoat and no hat. How long the man had been nearby there was no telling.
There was no reason to stay here. Lantry turned and started to walk slowly out. He looked hastily at the man as he passed and the man with the white hair looked back at him, curiously. Had he heard? The imprecations, the pleadings, the shoutings? Did he suspect? Lantry slowed his walk. Had this man seen him make the blue chalk marks? But then, would he interpret them as symbols of an ancient superstition? Probably not.
Reaching the door, Lantry paused. For a moment he did not want to do anything but lie down and be coldly, really dead again and be carried silently down the street to some distant burning flue and there dispatched in ash and whispering fire. If he was indeed alone and there was no chance to collect an army to his cause, what, then, existed as a reason for going on? Killing? Yes, he’d kill a few thousand more. But that wasn’t enough. You can only do so much of that before they drag you down.
He looked at the cold sky.
A rocket went across the black heaven, trailing fire.
Mars burned red among a million stars.
Mars. The library. The librarian. Talk. Returning rocket men. Tombs.
Lantry almost gave a shout. He restrained his hand, which wanted so much to reach up into the sky and touch Mars. Lovely red star on the sky.
Good star that gave him sudden new hope. If he had a living heart now it would be thrashing wildly, and sweat would be breaking out of him and his pulses would be stammering, and tears would be in his eyes!
He would go down to wherever the rockets sprang up into space. He would go to Mars, one way or another. He would go to the Martian tombs.
There, there were bodies, he would bet his last hatred on it, that would rise and walk and work with him! Theirs was an ancientculture, much different from that of Earth, patterned on the Egyptian, if what the librarian had said was true. And the Egyptian—what a crucible of dark superstition and midnight terror that culture had been. Mars it was, then. Beautiful Mars!
But he must not attract attention to himself. He must move carefully.
He wanted to run, yes, to get away, but that would be the worst possible move he could make. The man with the white hair was glancing at Lantry from time to time, in the entranceway. There were too many people about. If anything happened he would be outnumbered. So far he had taken on only one man at a time.
Lantry forced himself to stop and stand on the steps before the warehouse. The man with the white hair came on onto the steps also and stood, looking at the sky. He looked as if he was going to speak at any moment. He fumbled in his pockets and took out a packet of cigarettes.
V
They stood outside the morgue together, the tall, pink, white-haired man, and Lantry, hands in their pockets. It was a cool night with a white shell of a moon that washed a house here, a road there, and farther on, parts of a river.
“Cigarette?” The man offered Lantry one.
“Thanks.”
They lit up together. The man glanced at Lantry’s mouth. “Cool night.”
“Cool.”
They shifted their feet. “Terrible accident.”
“Terrible.”
“So many dead.”
“So many.”
Lantry felt himself some sort of delicate weight upon a scale. The other man did not seem to be looking at him, but rather listening and feeling toward him. There was a feathery balance here that made for vast discomfort.
He wanted to move away and get out from under this balancing, weighing.
The tall white-haired man said, “My name’s McClure.”
“Did you have any friends inside?” asked Lantry.
“No. A casual acquaintance. Awful accident.”
“Awful.”
They balanced each other. A beetle hissed by on the road with its seventeen tires whirling quietly. The moon showed a little town farther over in the black hills.
“I say,” said the man McClure.
“Yes.”
“Could you answer me a question?”
“Be glad to.” He loosened the knife in his coat pocket, ready.
“Is your name Lantry?” asked the man at last.
“Yes.”
“William Lantry?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re the man who came out of the Salem graveyard day before yesterday, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Good Lord, I’m glad to meet you, Lantry! We’ve been trying to find you for the past twenty-four hours!”
The man seized his hand, pumped it, slapped him on the back.
“What, what?” said Lantry.
“Good Lord, man, why did you run off? Do you realize what an instance this is? We want to talk to you!”
McClure was smiling, glowing. Another handshake, another slap. “I thought it was you!”
The man is mad, thought Lantry. Absolutely mad. Here I’ve toppled his incinerators, killed people, and he’s shaking my hand. Mad, mad!
“Will you come along to the Hall?” said the man, taking his elbow.
“Wh-what hall?” Lantry stepped back.
“The Science Hall, of course. It isn’t every year we get a real case of suspended animation. In small animals, yes, but in a man, hardly! Will you come?”
“What’s the act!” demanded Lantry, glaring. “What’s all this talk.”
“My dear fellow, what do you mean?” the man was stunned.
“Never mind. Is that the only reason you want to see me?”
“What other reason would there be, Mr. Lantry? You don’t know how glad I am to see you!” He almost did a little dance. “I suspected. When we were in there together. You being so pale and all. And then the way you smoked your cigarette, something about it, and a lot of other things, all subliminal. But it is you, isn’t it, it is you!”
“It is I. William Lantry.” Dryly.
“Good fellow! Come along!”
The beetle moved swiftly through the dawn streets. McClure talked rapidly.
Lantry sat, listening, astounded. Here was this fool, McClure, playing his cards for him! Here was this stupid scientist, or whatever, accepting him not as a suspicious baggage, a murderous item. Oh no! Quite the contrary!
Only as a suspended animation case was he considered! Not as a dangerous man at all. Far from it!
“Of course,” cried McClure, grinning. “You didn’t know where to go, whom to turn to. It was all quite incredible to you.”
“Yes.”
“I had a feeling you’d be there at the morgue tonight,” said McClure, happily.
“Oh?” Lantry stiffened.
“Yes. Can’t explain it. But you, how shall I put it? Ancient Americans? You had funny ideas on death. And you were among the dead so long, I felt you’d be drawn back by the accident, by the morgue and all. It’s not very logical. Silly, in fact. It’s just a feeling. I hate feelings but there it was. I came on a, I guess you’d call it a hunch, wouldn’t you?”
“You might call it that.”
“And there you were!”
“There I was,” said Lantry.
“Are you hungry?”
“I’ve eaten.”
“How did you get around?”
“I hitchhiked.”
“You what? ”
“People gave me rides on the road.”
“Remarkable.”
“I imagine it sounds that way.” He looked at the passing houses. “So this is the era of space travel, is it?”
“Oh, we’ve been traveling to Mars for some forty years now.”
“Amazing. And those big funnels, those towers in the middle of every town?”
“Those. Haven’t you heard? The Incinerators. Oh, of course, they hadn’t anything of that sort in your time. Had some bad luck with them. An explosion in Salem and one here, all in a forty-eight-hour period. You looked as if you were going to speak; what is it?”
“I was thinking,” said Lantry. “How fortunate I got out of my coffin when I did. I might well have been thrown into one of your Incinerators and burned up.”
“Quite.”
Lantry toyed with the dials on the beetle dash. He wouldn’t go to Mars. His plans were changed. If this fool simply refused to recognize an act of violence when he stumbled upon it, then let him be a fool. If they didn’t connect the two explosions with a man from the tomb, all well and good. Let them go on deluding themselves. If they couldn’t imagine someone being mean and nasty and murderous, heaven help them. He rubbed his hands with satisfaction. No, no Martian trip for you, as yet, Lantry lad. First, we’ll see what can be done boring from the inside. Plenty of time. The Incinerators can wait an extra week or so. One has to be subtle, you know. Any more immediate explosions might cause quite a ripple of thought.
McClure was gabbling wildly on.
“Of course, you don’t have to be examined immediately. You’ll want a rest. I’ll put you up at my place.”
“Thanks. I don’t feel up to being probed and pulled. Plenty of time in a week or so.”
They drew up before a house and climbed out.
“You want to sleep, naturally.”
“I’ve been asleep for centuries. Be glad to stay awake. I’m not a bit tired.”
“Good.” McClure let them into the house. He headed for the drink bar.
“A drink will fix us up.”
“You have one,” said Lantry. “Later for me. I just want to sit down.”
“By all means sit.” McClure mixed himself a drink. He looked around the room, looked at Lantry, paused for a moment with the drink in his hand, tilted his head to one side, and put his tongue in his cheek. Then he shrugged and stirred the drink. He walked slowly to a chair and sat, sipping the drink quietly. He seemed to be listening for something. “There are cigarettes on the table,” he said.
“Thanks.” Lantry took one and lit it and smoked it. He did not speak for some time.
Lantry thought, I’m taking this all too easily. Maybe I should kill and run. He’s the only one that has found me, yet. Perhaps this is all a trap.
Perhaps we’re simply sitting here waiting for the police. Or whatever in blazes they use for police these days. He looked at McClure. No. They weren’t waiting for police. They were waiting for something else.
McClure didn’t speak. He looked at Lantry’s face and he looked at Lantry’s hands. He looked at Lantry’s chest a long time, with easy quietness.
He sipped his drink. He looked at Lantry’s feet.
Finally he said, “Where’d you get the clothing?”
“I asked someone for clothes and they gave these things to me. Darned nice of them.”
“You’ll find that’s how we are in this world. All you have to do is ask.”
McClure shut up again. His eyes moved. Only his eyes and nothing else. Once or twice he lifted his drink.
A little clock ticked somewhere in the distance.
“Tell me about yourself, Mr. Lantry.”
“Nothing much to tell.”
“You’re modest.”
“Hardly. You know about the past. I know nothing of the future, or I should say ‘today’ and day before yesterday. You don’t learn much in a coffin.”
McClure did not speak. He suddenly sat forward in his chair and then leaned back and shook his head.
They’ll never suspect me, thought Lantry. They aren’t superstitious, they simply can’t believe in a dead man walking. Therefore, I’ll be safe. I’ll keep putting off the physical checkup. They’re polite. They won’t force me.
Then, I’ll work it so I can get to Mars. After that, the tombs, in my own good time, and the plan. God, how simple. How naïve these people are.
McClure sat across the room for five minutes. A coldness had come over him. The color was very slowly going from his face, as one sees the color of medicine vanishing as one presses the bulb at the top of a dropper. He leaned forward, saying nothing, and offered another cigarette to Lantry.
“Thanks.” Lantry took it. McClure sat deeply back into his easy chair, his knees folded one over the other. He did not look at Lantry, and yet somehow did. The feeling of weighing and balancing returned. McClure was like a tall thin master of hounds listening for something that nobody else could hear. There are little silver whistles you can blow that only dogs can hear. McClure seemed to be listening acutely, sensitively for such an invisible whistle, listening with his eyes and with his half-opened, dry mouth, and with his aching, breathing nostrils.
Lantry sucked the cigarette, sucked the cigarette, sucked the cigarette, and, as many times, blew out, blew out, blew out. McClure was like some lean red-shagged hound listening and listening with a slick slide of eyes to one side, with an apprehension in that hand that was so precisely microscopic that one only sensed it, as one sensed the invisible whistle, with some part of the brain deeper than eyes or nostril or ear.
The room was so quiet the cigarette smoke made some kind of invisible noise rising to the ceiling. McClure was a thermometer, a chemist’s scales, a listening hound, a litmus paper, an antennae; all these. Lantry did not move. Perhaps the feeling would pass. It had passed before. McClure did not move for a long while and then, without a word, he nodded at the sherry decanter, and Lantry refused as silently. They sat looking but not looking at each other, again and away, again and away.
McClure stiffened slowly. Lantry saw the color getting paler in those lean cheeks, and the hand tightening on the sherry glass, and a knowledge come at last to stay, never to go away, into the eyes.
Lantry did not move. He could not. All of this was of such a fascination that he wanted only to see, to hear what would happen next. It was McClure’s show from here on in.
McClure said, “At first I thought it was the first psychosis I have ever seen. You, I mean. I thought, he’s convinced himself, Lantry’s convinced himself, he’s quite insane, he’s told himself to do all these little things.”
McClure talked as if in a dream, and continued talking and didn’t stop.
“I said to myself, he purposely doesn’t breathe through his nose. I watched your nostrils, Lantry. The little nostril hairs never once quivered in the last hour. That wasn’t enough. It was a fact I filed. It wasn’t enough. He breathes through his mouth, I said, on purpose. And then I gave you a cigarette and you sucked and blew, sucked and blew. None of it ever came out your nose. I told myself, well, that’s all right. He doesn’t inhale. Is that terrible, is that suspect? All in the mouth, all in the mouth. And then, I looked at your chest. I watched. It never moved up or down, it did nothing. He’s convinced himself, I said to myself. He’s convinced himself about all this. He doesn’t move his chest, except slowly, when he thinks you’re not looking.
That’s what I told myself.”
The words went on in the silent room, not pausing, still in a dream.
“And then I offered you a drink but you don’t drink and I thought, he doesn’t drink, I thought. Is that terrible? And I watched and watched you all this time.
Lantry holds his breath, he’s fooling himself. But now, yes, now, I understand it quite well. Now I know everything the way it is. Do you know how I know?
I do not hear breathing in the room. I wait and I hear nothing. There is no beat of heart or intake of lung. The room is so silent. Nonsense, one might say, but I know. At the Incinerator I know. There is a difference. You enter a room where a man is on a bed and you know immediately whether he will look up and speak to you or whether he will not speak to you ever again. Laugh if you will, but one can tell. It is a subliminal thing. It is the whistle the dog hears when no human hears. It is the tick of a clock that has ticked so long one no longer notices. Something is in a room when a man lives in it. Something is not in the room when a man is dead in it.”
McClure shut his eyes a moment. He put down his sherry glass. He waited a moment. He took up his cigarette and puffed it and then put it down in a black tray.
“I am alone in this room,” he said.
Lantry did not move.
“You are dead,” said McClure. “My mind does not know this. It is not a thinking thing. It is a thing of the senses and the subconscious. At first I thought, this man thinks he is dead, risen from the dead, a vampire. Is that not logical? Would not any man, buried as many centuries, raised in a superstitious, ignorant culture, think likewise of himself once risen from the tomb? Yes, that is logical. This man has hypnotized himself and fitted his bodily functions so that they would in no way interfere with his self-delusion, his great paranoia. He governs his breathing. He tells himself, I cannot hear my breathing, therefore I am dead. His inner mind censors the sound of breathing. He does not allow himself to eat or drink. These things he probably does in his sleep, with part of his mind, hiding the evidences of this humanity from his deluded mind at other times.”
McClure finished it. “I was wrong. You are not insane. You are not deluding yourself. Nor me. This is all very illogical and—I must admit—
almost frightening. Does that make you feel good, to think you frighten me? I have no label for you. You’re a very odd man, Lantry. I’m glad to have met you. This will make an interesting report indeed.”
“Is there anything wrong with me being dead?” said Lantry. “Is it a crime?”
“You must admit it’s highly unusual.”
“But, still now, is it a crime?” asked Lantry.
“We have no crime, no criminal court. We want to examine you, naturally, to find out how you have happened. It is like that chemical which, one minute is inert, the next is living cell. Who can say where what happened to what. You are that impossibility. It is enough to drive a man quite insane.”
“Will I be released when you are done fingering me?”
“You will not be held. If you don’t wish to be examined, you will not be. But I am hoping you will help by offering us your services.”
“I might,” said Lantry.
“But tell me,” said McClure. “What were you doing at the morgue?”
“Nothing.”
“I heard you talking when I came in.”
“I was merely curious.”
“You’re lying. That is very bad, Mr. Lantry. The truth is far better. The truth is, is it not, that you are dead and, being the only one of your sort, were lonely. Therefore you killed people to have company.”
“How does that follow?”
McClure laughed. “Logic, my dear fellow. Once I knew you were really dead, a moment ago, really a—what do you call it—a vampire (silly word!) I tied you immediately to the Incinerator blasts. Before that there was no reason to connect you. But once the one piece fell into place, the fact that you were dead, then it was simple to guess your loneliness, your hate, your envy, all of the tawdry motivations of a walking corpse. It took only an instant then to see the Incinerators blown to blazes, and then to think of you, among the bodies at the morgue, seeking help, seeking friends and people like yourself to work with—”
“Blast you!” Lantry was out of the chair. He was halfway to the other man when McClure rolled over and scuttled away, flinging the sherry decanter. With a great despair Lantry realized that, like an idiot, he had thrown away his one chance to kill McClure. He should have done it earlier. It had been Lantry’s one weapon, his safety margin. If people in a society never killed each other, they never suspected one another. You could walk up to any one of them and kill him.
“Come back here!” Lantry threw the knife.
McClure got behind a chair. The idea of flight, of protection, of fighting, was still new to him. He had part of the idea, but there was still a bit of luck on Lantry’s side if Lantry wanted to use it.
“Oh, no,” said McClure, holding the chair between himself and the advancing man. “You want to kill me. It’s odd, but true. I can’t understand it.
You want to cut me with that knife or something like that, and it’s up to me to prevent you from doing such an odd thing.”
“I will kill you!” Lantry let it slip out. He cursed himself. That was the worst possible thing to say.
Lantry lunged across the chair, clutching at McClure.
McClure was very logical. “It won’t do you any good to kill me. You know that.” They wrestled and held each other in a wild, toppling shuffle.
Tables fell over, scattering articles. “You remember what happened in the morgue?”
“I don’t care!” screamed Lantry.
“You didn’t raise those dead, did you?”
“I don’t care!” cried Lantry.
“Look here,” said McClure, reasonably. “There will never be any more like you, ever, there’s no use.”
“Then I’ll destroy all of you, all of you!” screamed Lantry.
“And then what? You’ll still be alone, with no more like you about.”
“I’ll go to Mars. They have tombs there. I’ll find more like myself!”
“No,” said McClure. “The executive order went through yesterday. All of the tombs are being deprived of their bodies. They’ll be burned in the next week.”
They fell together to the floor. Lantry got his hands on McClure’s throat.
“Please,” said McClure. “Do you see, you’ll die.”
“What do you mean?” cried Lantry.
“Once you kill all of us, and you’re alone, you’ll die! The hate will die. That hate is what moved you, nothing else! That envy moves you.
Nothing else! You’ll die, inevitably. You’re not immortal. You’re not even alive, you’re nothing but a moving hate.”
“I don’t care!” screamed Lantry, and began choking the man, beating his head with his fists, crouched on the defenseless body. McClure looked up at him with dying eyes.
The front door opened. Two men came in.
“I say,” said one of them. “What’s going on? A new game?”
Lantry jumped back and began to run.
“Yes, a new game!” said McClure, struggling up. “Catch him and you win!”
The two men caught Lantry. “We win,” they said.
“Let me go!” Lantry thrashed, hitting them across their faces, bringing blood.
“Hold him tight!” cried McClure.
They held him.
“A rough game, what?” one of them said. “What do we do now? ”
The beetle hissed along the shining road. Rain fell out of the sky and a wind ripped at the dark green wet trees. In the beetle, his hands on the half-wheel, McClure was talking. His voice was susurrant, a whispering, a hypnotic thing. The two other men sat in the back seat. Lantry sat, or rather lay, in the front seat, his head back, his eyes faintly open, the glowing green light of the dash dials showing on his cheeks. His mouth was relaxed. He did not speak.
McClure talked quietly and logically, about life and moving, about death and not moving, about the sun and the great sun Incinerator, about the emptied tombyard, about hatred and how hate lived and made a clay man live and move, and how illogical it all was, it all was, it all was. One was dead, was dead, was dead, that was all, all, all. One did not try to be otherwise. The car whispered on the moving road. The rain spattered gently on the windshield. The men in the back seat conversed quietly. Where were they going, going? To the Incinerator, of course. Cigarette smoke moved slowly up on the air, curling and tying into itself in gray loops and spirals. One was dead and must accept it.
Lantry did not move. He was a marionette, the strings cut. There was only a tiny hatred in his heart, in his eyes, like twin coals, feeble, glowing, fading.
I am Poe, he thought. I am all that is left of Edgar Allan Poe, and I am all that is left of Ambrose Bierce and all that is left of a man named Lovecraft.
I am a gray night bat with sharp teeth, and I am a square black monolith monster. I am Osiris and Bal and Set. I am the Necronomicon, the Book of the Dead. I am the house of Usher, falling into flame. I am the Red Death. I am the man mortared into the catacomb with a cask of Amontillado … I am a dancing skeleton. I am a coffin, a shroud, a lightning bolt reflected in an old house window. I am an autumn-empty tree, I am a rapping, flinging shutter. I am a yellowed volume turned by a claw hand. I am an organ played in an attic at midnight. I am a mask, a skull mask behind an oak tree on the last day of October. I am a poison apple bobbling in a water tub for child noses to bump at, for child teeth to snap … I am a black candle lighted before an inverted cross. I am a coffin lid, a sheet with eyes, a foot-step on a black stairwell. I am Dunsany and Machen and I am the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I am The Monkey’s Paw and I am The Phantom Rickshaw. I am the Cat and the Canary, the Gorilla, the Bat. I am the ghost of Hamlet’s father on the castle wall.
All of these things am I. And now these last things will be burned.
While I lived they still lived. While I moved and hated and existed, they still existed. I am all that remembers them. I am all of them that still goes on, and will not go on after tonight. Tonight, all of us, Poe and Bierce and Hamlet’s father, we burn together. They will make a big heap of us and burn us like a bonfire, like things of Guy Fawkes’ day, gasoline, torches, cries, and all!
And what a wailing will we put up. The world will be clean of us, but in our going we shall say, oh what is the world like, clean of fear, where is the dark imagination from the dark time, the thrill and the anticipation, the suspense of old October, gone, never more to come again, flattened and smashed and burned by the rocket people, by the Incinerator people, destroyed and obliterated, to be replaced by doors that open and close and lights that go on and off without fear. If only you could remember how once we lived, what Halloween was to us, and what Poe was, and how we gloried in the dark morbidities. One more drink, dear friends, of Amontillado, before the burning. All of this, all, exists but in one last brain on earth. A whole world dying tonight. One more drink, pray.
“Here we are,” said McClure.
The Incinerator was brightly lighted. There was quiet music nearby.
McClure got out of the beetle, came around to the other side. He opened the door. Lantry simply lay there. The talking and the logical talking had slowly drained him of life. He was no more than wax now, with a small glow in his eyes. This future world, how the men talked to you, how logically they reasoned away your life. They wouldn’t believe in him. The force of their disbelief froze him. He could not move his arms or his legs. He could only mumble senselessly, coldly, eyes flickering.
McClure and the two others helped him out of the car, put him in a golden box, and rolled him on a roller table into the warm glowing interior of the building.
I am Edgar Allan Poe, I am Ambrose Bierce, I am Halloween, I am a coffin, a shroud, a Monkey’s Paw, a Phantom, a Vampire …
“Yes, yes,” said McClure, quietly, over him. “I know. I know.”
The table glided. The walls swung over him and by him, the music played. You are dead, you are logically dead.
I am Usher, I am the Maelstrom, I am the MS Found In A Bottle, I am the Pit and I am the Pendulum, I am the Telltale Heart, I am the Raven nevermore, nevermore.
“Yes,” said McClure, as they walked softly. “I know.”
“I am in the catacomb,” cried Lantry.
“Yes, the catacomb,” said the walking man over him.
“I am being chained to a wall, and there is no bottle of Amontillado here!” cried Lantry weakly, eyes closed.
“Yes,” someone said.
There was movement. The flame door opened.
“Now someone is mortaring up the cell, closing me in!”
“Yes, I know.” A whisper.
The golden box slid into the flame lock.
“I’m being walled in! A very good joke indeed! Let us be gone!” A wild scream and much laughter.
“We know, we understand …”
The inner flame lock opened. The golden coffin shot forth into flame.
“For the love of God, Montresor! For the love of God !”
The End
Conclusion
It’s a nice little story to read. A bit on the horrific side, but a good read never the less. I hope that you all enjoyed it.
This is a nice story by Ray Bradbury. I dedicate it to the many, many MM readers that tell me that they have changed by visiting this site, and that they are all the better for it. They tell me stories, and adventures, and just amazing events that confirm that everyone is on the right track. This story is about a man who changes.
Chrysalis.
This story is dedicated to youse guys. It’s my way of telling you that I recognize what you are tying to ell me, and that I am so gladdened by your stories. It’s just a fictional story, and you all, well, you all are the “real deal”. But Ray Bradbury has such a way with the words, and he conjures up such imagery, that I think that this is a treasure.
A treasure that is worthy for you all.
Chrysalis
Rockwell didn’t like the room’s smell. Not so much McGuke’s odor of beer, or Hartley’s unwashed, tired smell—-but the sharp insect tang rising from Smith’s cold green-skinned body lying stiffly naked on the table. There was also a smell of oil and grease from the nameless machinery gleaming in one comer of the small room.
The man Smith was a corpse. Irritated, Rockwell rose from his chair and packed his stethoscope. “I must get back to the hospital. War rush. You understand, Hartley. Smith’s been dead eight hours. If you want further information call a post-mortem—”
He stopped as Hartley raised a trembling, bony hand. Hartley gestured at the corpse—this corpse with brittle hard green shell grown solid over every inch of flesh. “Use your stethoscope again, Rockwell. Just once more. Please.”
Rockwell wanted to complain, but instead he sighed, sat down, and used the stethoscope. You have to treat fellow doctors politely. You press your stethoscope into cold green flesh, pretending to listen—
The small, dimly lit room exploded around him. Exploded in one green cold pulsing. It hit Rockwell’s ears like fists. It hit him. He saw his own fingers jerk over the recumbent corpse.
He heard a pulse.
Deep in the dark body the heart beat once. It sounded like an echo in fathoms of sea water.
Smith was dead, unbreathing, mummified. But at the core of that deadness—his heart lived. Lived, stirring like a small unborn baby!
Rockwell’s crisp surgeon’s fingers darted rapidly. He bent his head. In the light it was dark-haired, with flecks of gray in it. He had an even, level, nice-looking face. About thirty-five. He listened again and again, with sweat coming cold on his smooth cheeks. The pulse was not to be believed.
One heartbeat every thirty-five seconds.
Smith’s respiration—how could you believe that, too one breath of air every four minutes. Lungcase movement imperceptible.
Body temperature?
Sixty degrees.
Hartley laughed. It was not a pleasant laugh. More like an echo that had gotten lost. “He’s alive,” he said tiredly. “Yes, he is. He almost fooled me many times. I injected adrenalin to speed that pulse, but it was no use. He’s been this way for twelve weeks. And I couldn’t stand keeping him a secret any longer. That’s why I phoned you, Rockwell. He’s—unnatural.
The impossibility of it overwhelmed Rockwell with an inexplicable excitement. He tried to lift Smiths’ eyelids. He couldn’t. They were webbed with epidermis. So were the lips. So were the nostrils. There was no way for Smith to breathe—
“Yet, he’s breathing.” Rockwell’s voice was numb. He dropped his stethoscope blankly, picked it up, and saw his fingers shaking.
Hartley grew tall, emaciated, nervous over the table. “Smith didn’t like my calling you. I called anyway. Smith warned me not to. Just an hour ago.”
Rockell’s eyes dilated into hot black circles. “How could he warn you? He can’t move.”
Hartley’s face, all razor-sharp bone, hard jaw, tight squinting gray eyes, twitched nervously. Smith— thinks. I know his thoughts. He’s afraid you’ll expose him to the world. He hates me. Why? I want to kill him, that’s why. Here.” Hardey fumbled blindly for a blue-steel revolver in his rumpled, stained coat. “Murphy. Take this. Take it before I use it on Smith’s foul body!”
Murphy pulled back, his thick red face afraid. “Don’t like guns. You take it, Rockwell.”
Like a scalpel, Rockwell made his voice slash. “Put the gun away, Hartley. After three months tending one patient you’ve got a psychological blemish. Sleep’ll help that.” He licked his lips. “What sort of disease has Smith got?”
Hartley swayed. His mouth moved words out slowly. Falling asleep on his feet, Rockwell realized. “Not diseased,” Hartley managed to say. “Don’t know what. But I resent him, like a kid resents the birth of a new brother or sister. He’s wrong. Help me. Help me, will you?”
“Of course.” Rockwell smiled. “My desert sanitarium’s the place to check him over, good. Why—why Smith’s the most incredible medical phenomenon in history. Bodies just don’t act this way!”
He got no further. Hartley had his gun pointed right at Rockwell’s stomach. “Wait. Wait. You—you’re not going to bury Smith! I thought you’d help me. Smith’s not healthy. I want him killed! He’s dangerous! I know he is!”
Rockwell blinked. Hartley was obviously psychoneurotic. Didn’t know what he was saying. Rockwell straightened his shoulders, feeling cool and calm inside. “Shoot Smith and I’ll turn you in for murder. You’re overworked mentally and physically. Put the gun away.”
They stared at one another.
Rockwell walked forward quietly and took the gun, patted Hartley understandingly on the shoulder, and gave the weapon to Murphy, who looked at it as if it would bite him. “Call the hospital. Murphy. I’m taking a week off. Maybe longer. Tell them I’m doing research at the sanitarium.”
A scowl formed in the red fat flesh of Murphy’s face. “What do I do with this gun?”
Hartley shut his teeth together, hard. “Keep it. You’ll want to use it—
later.”
Rockwell wanted to shout it to the world that he was sole possessor of the most incredible human in history. The sun was bright in the desert sanitarium room where
Smith lay, not saying a word, on his table; his handsome face frozen into a green, passionless expression.
Rockwell walked into the room quietly. He used the stethoscope on the green chest. It scraped, making the noise of metal tapping a beetle’s carapace.
McGuire stood by, eyeing the body dubiously, smelling of several recently acquired beers.
Rockwell listened intently. “The ambulance ride may have jolted him.
No use taking a chance—”
Rockwell cried out.
Heavily, McGuire lumbered to his side. ‘What’s wrong?”
“Wrong?” Rockwell stared about in desperation. He made one hand into a fist. “Smith’s dying!”
“How do you know? Hartley said Smith plays possum. He’s fooled you again—”
“No!” Rockwell worked furiously over the body, injecting drugs. Any drugs. Swearing at the top of his voice. After all this trouble, he couldn’t lose Smith. No, not now.
Shaking, jarring, twisting deep down inside, going completely liquidly mad. Smith’s body sounded like dim volcanic tides bursting.
Rockwell fought to remain calm. Smith was a case unto himself.
Normal treatment did nothing for him. What then? What?
Rockwell stared. Sunlight gleamed on Smith’s hard flesh. Hot sunlight. It flashed, glinting off the stethoscope tip. The sun. As he watched, clouds shifted across the sky outside, taking the sun away. The room darkened. Smith’s body shook into silence. The volcanic tides died.
“McGuire! Pull the blinds! Before the sun comes back!”
McGuire obeyed.
Smith’s heart slowed down to its sluggish, infrequent breathing.
“Sunlight’s bad for Smith. It counteracts something. I don’t know what or why, but it’s not good—” Rockwell relaxed. “Lord, I wouldn’t want to lose Smith. Not for anything. He’s different, making his own standards, doing things men have never done. Know something, Murphy?”
“What?”
“Smith’s not in agony. He’s not dying either. He wouldn’t be better off dead, no matter what Hartley says. Last night as I arranged Smith on the stretcher, readying him for his trip to this sanitarium, I realized, suddenly, that Smith likes me.”
“Gah. First Hartley. Now you. Did Smith tell you that?”
“He didn’t tell me. But he’s not unconscious under all that hard skin.
He’s aware. Yes, that’s it. He’s aware.”
“Pure and simply—he’s petrifying. He’ll die. It’s been weeks since he was fed. Hartley said so. Hartley fed him intravenously until the skin toughened so a needle couldn’t poke through it.”
Whining, the cubicle door swung slowly open. Rockwell started.
Hartley, his sharp face relaxed after hours of sleep, his eyes still a bitter gray, hostile, stood tall in the door. “If you’ll leave the room,” he said, quietly, “I’ll destroy Smith in a very few seconds. Well?”
“Don’t come a step closer.” Rockwell walked, feeling irritation, to Hartley’s side. “Every time you visit, you’ll have to be searched. Frankly, I don’t trust you.” There were no weapons. “Why didn’t you tell me about the sunlight?”
“Eh?” Soft and slow Hartley said it. “Oh—yes. I forgot. I tried shifting Smith weeks ago. Sunlight struck him and he began really dying.
Naturally, I stopped trying to move him. Smith seemed to know what was coming, vaguely. Perhaps he planned it; I’m not sure. While he was still able to talk and eat ravenously, before his body stiffened completely, he warned me not to move him for a twelve-week period. Said he didn’t like the sun.
Said it would spoil things. I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. He ate like an animal, a hungry, wild animal, fell into a coma, and here he is—” Hartley swore under his breath. “I’d rather hoped you’d leave him in the sun long enough to kill him inadvertently.”
McGuire shifted his two hundred fifty pounds. “Look here, now.
What if we catch Smith’s disease?”
Hartley looked at the body, his pupils shrinking. “Smith’s not diseased. Don’t you recognize degeneration when you see it? It’s like cancer.
You don’t catch it, you inherit a tendency. I didn’t begin to fear and hate Smith until a week ago when I discovered he was breathing and existing and thriving with his nostrils and mouth sealed. It can’t happen. It mustn’t happen.”
McGuire’s voice trembled. “What if you and I and Rockwell all turn green and a plague sweeps the country—what then?”
“Then,” replied Rockwell, “if I’m wrong, perhaps I am, I’ll die. But it doesn’t worry me in the least.”
He turned back to Smith and went on with his work.
A bell. A bell. Two bells, two bells. A dozen bells, a hundred bells.
Ten thousand and a million clangorous, hammering metal dinning bells. All born at once in the silence, squalling, screaming, hurting echoes, bruising ears!
Ringing, chanting with loud and soft, tenor and bass, low and high voices. Great-armed clappers knocking the shells and ripping air with the thrusting din of sound!
With all those bells ringing, Smith could not immediately know where he was. He knew that he could not see, because his eyelids were sealed tight, knew he could not speak because his lips had grown together. His ears were clamped shut, but the bells hammered nevertheless.
He could not see. But yes, yes, he could, and it was like inside a small dark red cavern, as if his eyes were turned inward upon his skull. And Smith tried to twist his tongue, and suddenly, trying to scream, he knew his tongue was gone, that the place where it used to be was vacant, an itching spot that wanted a tongue but couldn’t have it just now.
No tongue. Strange. Why? Smith tried to stop the bells. They ceased, blessing him with a silence that wrapped him up in a cold blanket. Things were happening. Happening.
Smith tried to twitch a finger, but he had no control. A foot, a leg, a toe, his head, everything. Nothing moved. Torso, limbs—immovable, frozen in a concrete coffin.
A moment later came the dread discovery that he was no longer breathing. Not with his lungs, anyway.
“BECAUSE I HAVE NO LUNGS!” he screamed. Inwardly he screamed and that mental scream was drowned, webbed, clotted, and journeyed drowsily down in a red, dark tide. A red drowsy tide that sleepily swathed the scream, garroted it, took it all away, making Smith rest easier.
I am not afraid, he thought. I understand that which I do not understand. I understand that I do not fear, yet know not the reason.
No tongue, no nose, no lungs.
But they would come later. Yes, they would. Things were—
happening.
Through the pores of his shelled body air slid, like rain needling each portion of him, giving life. Breathing through a billion gills, breathing oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen and carbon dioxide, and using it all. Wondering.
Was his heart still beating?
But yes, it was beating. Slow, slow, slow. A red dim susurrance, a flood, a river surging around him, slow, slower, slower. So nice.
So restful.
The jigsaw pieces fitted together faster as the days drifted into weeks.
McGuire helped. A retired surgeon-medico, he’d been Rockwell’s secretary for a number of years. Not much help, but good company.
Rockwell noted that McGuire joked gruffly about Smith, nervously; and a lot. Trying to be calm. But one day McGuire stopped, thought it over, and drawled, “Hey, it just came to me! Smith’s alive. He should be dead. But he’s alive. Good God!”
Rockwell laughed. “What in blazes do you think I’m working on? I’m bringing an X-ray machine out next week so I can find out what’s going on inside Smith’s shell.” Rockwell jabbed with a hypo needle. It broke on the hard shell.
Rockwell tried another needle, and another, until finally he punctured, drew blood, and placed the slides under the microscope for study. Hours later he calmly shoved a serum test under McGuire’s red nose, and spoke quickly.
“Lord, I can’t believe it. His blood’s germicidal. I dropped a streptococci colony into it and the strep was annihilated in eight seconds! You could inject every known disease into Smith and he’d destroy them all, thrive on them!”
It was only a matter of hours until other discoveries. It kept Rockwell sleepless, tossing at night, wondering, theorizing the titanic ideas over and over. For instance—
Hartley’d fed Smith so many cc’s of blood-food every day of his illness until recently. NONE OF THAT FOOD HAD EVER BEEN
ELIMINATED. All of it had been stored, not in bulk-fats, but in a perfectly abnormal solution, an x-liquid contained in high concentrate form in Smith’s blood. An ounce of it would keep a man well fed for three days. This x-liquid circulated through the body until it was actually needed, when it was seized upon and used. More serviceable than fat. Much more!
Rockwell glowed with his discovery. Smith had enough x-liquid stored in him to last months and months more. Self-sustaining.
McGuire, when told, contemplated his paunch sadly.
“I wish I stored my food that way.”
That wasn’t all. Smith needed little air. What air he had he seemed to acquire by an osmotic process through his skin. And he used every molecule of it. No waste.
“And,” finished Rockwell, “eventually Smith’s heart might even take vacations from beating, entirely!”
“Then he’d be dead,” said McGuire.
“To you and I, yes. To Smith—maybe. Just maybe. Think of it, McGuire. Collectively, in Smith, we have a self-purifying blood stream demanding no replenishment but an interior one for months, having little breakdown and no elimination of wastes whatsoever because every molecule is utilized, self-evolving, and fatal to any and all microbic life. All this, and Hartley speaks of degeneration!”
Hartley was irritated when he heard of the discoveries. But he still insisted that Smith was degenerating. Dangerous.
McGuire tossed his two cents in. “How do we know that this isn’t some super microscopic disease that annihilates all other bacteria while it works on its victim. After all—malarial fever is sometimes used surgically to cure syphilis; why not a new bacillus that conquers all?”
“Good point,” said Rockwell. “But we’re not sick, are we?”
“It may have to incubate in our bodies.”
“A typical old-fashioned doctor’s response. No matter what happens to a man, he’s ‘sick’—if he varies from the norm. That’s your idea, Hartley,”
declared Rockwell, “not mine. Doctors aren’t satisfied unless they diagnose and label each case. Well, I think that Smith’s healthy; so healthy you’re afraid of him.”
“You’re crazy,” said McGuire.
“Maybe. But I don’t think Smith needs medical interference. He’s working out his own salvation. You believe he’s degenerating. I say he’s growing.’*
“Look at Smith’s skin,” complained McGuire.
“Sheep in wolfs clothing. Outside, the hard, brittle epidermis. Inside, ordered regrowth, change. Why? I’m on the verge of knowing. These changes inside Smith are so violent that they need a shell to protect their action. And as for you. Hartley, answer me truthfully, when you were young, were you afraid of insects, spiders, things like that?”
“Yes.”
“There you are. A phobia. A phobia you use against Smith. That explains your distaste for Smith’s change.”
In the following weeks, Rockwell went back over Smith’s life carefully. He visited the electronics lab where Smith had been employed and fallen ill. He probed the room where Smith had spent the first weeks of his
“illness” with Hartley in attendance. He examined the machinery there.
Something about radiations
While he was away from the sanitarium, Rockwell locked Smith tightly, and had McGuire guard the door in case Hartley got any unusual ideas.
The details of Smith’s twenty-three years were simple. He had worked for five years in the electronics lab, experimenting. He had never been seriously sick in his life.
And as the days went by Rockwell took long walks in the dry-wash near the sanitarium, alone. It gave him time to think and solidify the incredible theory that was becoming a unit in his brain.
And one afternoon he paused by a night-blooming jasmine outside the sanitarium, reached up, smiling, and plucked a dark shining object off of a high branch. He looked at the object and tucked it in his pocket. Then he walked into the sanitarium.
He summoned McGuire in off the veranda. McGuire came. Hartley trailed behind, threatening, complaining. The three of them sat in the living quarters of the building.
Rockwell told them.
“Smith’s not diseased. Germs can’t live in him. He’s not inhabited by banshees or weird monsters who’ve ‘taken over’ his body. I mention this to show I’ve left no stone untouched. I reject all normal diagnoses of Smith. I offer the most important, the most easily accepted possibility of—delayed hereditary mutation.”
“Mutation?” McGuire’s voice was funny.
Rockwell held up the shiny dark object in the light.
“I found this on a bush in the garden. It’ll illustrate my theory to perfection. After studying Smith’s symptoms, examining his laboratory, and considering several of these”—he twirled the dark object in his fingers— “I’m certain. It’s metamorphosis. It’s regeneration, change, mutation after birth.
Here. Catch. This is Smith.”
He tossed the object to Hartley. Hartley caught it.
“This is the chrysalis of a caterpillar,” said Hartley.
Rockwell nodded. “Yes, it is.”
“You don’t mean to infer that Smith’s a— chrysalis?”
“I’m positive of it,” replied Rockwell.
Rockwell stood over Smith’s body in the darkness of evening. Hartley and McGuire sat across the patient’s room, quiet, listening. Rockwell touched Smith softly. “Suppose that there’s more to life than just being born, living seventy years, and dying. Suppose there’s one more great step up in man’s existence, and Smith has been the first of us to make that step.
“Looking at a caterpillar, we see what we consider a static object. But it changes to a butterfly. Why? There are no final theories explaining it. It’s progress, mainly. The pertinent thing is that a supposedly unchangeable object weaves itself into an intermediary object, wholly unrecognizable, a chrysalis, and emerges a butterfly. Outwardly the chrysalis looks dead. This is misdirection. Smith has misdirected us, you see. Outwardly, dead. Inwardly, fluids whirlpool, reconstruct, rush about with wild purpose. From grub to mosquito, from caterpillar to butterfly, from Smith to—?”
“Smith a chrysalis?” McGuire laughed heavily.
“Yes.”
“Humans don’t work that way.”
“Stop it, McGuire. This evolutionary step’s too great for your comprehension. Examine this body and tell me anything else. Skin, eyes, breathing, blood flow. Weeks of assimilating food for his brittle hibernation.
Why did he eat all that food, why did he need that x-liquid in his body except for his metamorphosis? And the cause of it all was—eradiations. Hard radiations from Smith’s laboratory equipment. Planned or accidental I don’t know. It touched some part of his essential gene-structure, some part of the evolutionary structure of man that wasn’t scheduled for working for thousands of years yet, perhaps.”
“Do you think that some day all men—?”
“The maggot doesn’t stay in the stagnant pond, the grub in the soil, or the caterpillar on a cabbage leaf. They change, spreading across space in waves.
“Smith’s the answer to the problem ‘What happens next for man, where do we go from here?’ We’re faced with the blank wall of the universe and the fatality of living in that universe, and man as he is today is not prepared to go against the universe. The least exertion tires man, overwork kills his heart, disease his body. Maybe Smith will be prepared to answer the philosophers’ problem of life’s purpose. Maybe he can give it new purpose.
“Why, we’re just petty insects, all of us, fighting on a pinhead planet.
Man isn’t meant to remain here and be sick and small and weak, but he hasn’t discovered the secret of the greater knowledge yet.
“But—change man. Build your perfect man. Your— your superman, if you like. Eliminate petty mentality, give him complete physiological, neurological, psychological control of himself: give him clear, incisive channels of thought, give him an indefatigable blood stream, a body that can go months without outside food, that can adjust to any climate anywhere and kill any disease. Release man from the shackles of flesh and flesh misery and then he’s no longer a poor, petty little man afraid to dream because he knows his frail body stands between him and the fulfillment of dreams, then he’s ready to wage war, the only war worth waging—the conflict of man reborn and the whole confounded universe!”
Breathless, voice hoarse, heart pounding, Rockwell tensed over Smith, placed his hands admiringly, firmly on the cold length of the chrysalis and shut his eyes. The power and drive and belief in Smith surged through him. He was right. He was right. He knew he was right. He opened his eyes and looked at McGuire and Hartley who were mere shadows in the dim shielded light of the room.
After a silence of several seconds. Hartley snuffed out his cigarette. “I don’t believe that theory.”
McGuire said, “How do youknow Smith’s not just a mess of jelly inside? Did you X-ray him?”
“I couldn’t risk it, it might interfere with his change, like the sunlight did.”
“So he’s going to be a superman? What will he look like?”
“We’ll wait and see.”
“Do you think he can hear us talking about him now?”
“Whether or not he can, there’s one thing certain— we’re sharing a secret we weren’t intended to know. Smith didn’t plan on myself and McGuire entering the case. He had to make the most of it. But a superman doesn’t like people to know about him. Humans have a nasty way of being envious, jealous, and hateful. Smith knew he wouldn’t be safe if found out. Maybe that explains your hatred, too. Hartley.”
They all remained silent, listening. Nothing sounded. Rockwell’s blood whispered in his temples, that was all. There was Smith, no longer Smith, a container labeled Smith, its contents unknown.
“If what you say is true,” said Hartley, “then indeed we should destroy him. Think of the power over the world he would have. And if it affects his brain as I think it will affect it—he’ll try to kill us when he escapes because we are the only ones who know about him. He’ll hate us for prying.”
Rockwell said it easily. “I’m not afraid.”
Hartley remained silent. His breathing was harsh and loud in the room.
Rockwell came around the table, gesturing.
“I think we’d better say good-night now, don’t you?”
The thin rain swallowed Hartley’s car. Rockwell closed the door, instructed McGuire to sleep downstairs tonight on a cot fronting Smith’s room, and then he walked upstairs to bed.
Undressing, he had time to conjure over all the unbelievable events of the passing weeks. A superman. Why not? Efficiency, strength—
He slipped into bed.
When. When does Smith emerge from his chrysalis? When?
The rain drizzled quietly on the roof of the sanitarium.
McGuire lay in the middle of the sound of rain and the earthquaking of thunder, slumbering on the cot, breathing heavy breaths. Somewhere, a door creaked, but McGuire breathed on. Wind gusted down the hall.
McGuire granted and rolled over. A door closed softly and the wind ceased.
Footsteps tread softly on the deep carpeting. Slow footsteps, aware and alert and ready. Footsteps. McGuire blinked his eyes and opened them.
In the dim light a figure stood over him.
Upstairs, a single light m the hall thrust down a yellow shaft near McGuire’s cot.
An odor of crashed insect filled the air. A hand moved. A voice started to speak.
McGuire screamed.
Because the hand that moved into the light was green.
Green.
“Smith!’
McGuire flung himself ponderously down the hall, yelling.
“He’s walking! He can’t walk, but he’s walking!”
The door rammed open under McGuire’s bulk. Wind and rain shrieked in around him and he was gone into the storm, babbling.
In the hall, the figure was motionless. Upstairs a door opened swiftly and Rockwell ran down the steps. The green hand moved back out of the light behind the figure’s back.
“Who is it?” Rockwell paused halfway.
The figure stepped into the light.
Rockwell’s eyes narrowed.
“Hartley! What are you doing back here?”
“Something happened,” said Hartley. “You’d better get McGuire. He ran out in the rain babbling like a fool.”
Rockwell kept his thoughts to himself. He searched Hartley swiftly with one glance and then ran down the hall and out into the cold wind.
“McGuire! McGuire, come back you idiot!” The rain fell on Rockwell’s body as he ran. He found McGuire about a hundred yards from the sanitarium, blubbering,
“Smith—Smith’s walking .. .” “Nonsense. Hartley came back, that’s all.”
“I saw a green hand. It moved.”
“You dreamed.”
“No. No.” McGuire’s face was flabby pale, with water on it. “I saw a green hand, believe me. Why did Hartley come back? He—”
At the mention of Hartley’s name, full comprehension came smashing to Rockwell. Fear leaped through his mind, a mad blur of warning, a jagged edge of silent screaming for help.
“Hartley!”
Shoving McGuire abruptly aside, Rockwell twisted and leaped back toward the sanitarium, shouting. Into the hall, down the hall—
Smith’s door was broken open.
Gun in hand, Hartley was in the center of the room. He turned at the noise of Rockwell’s running. They both moved simultaneously. Hartley fired his gun and Rockwell pulled the light switch.
Darkness. Flame blew across the room, profiling Smith’s rigid body like a flash photo. Rockwell jumped at the flame. Even as he jumped, shocked deep, realizing why Hartley had returned. In that instant before the lights blinked out Rockwell had a glimpse of Hartley’s fingers.
They were a brittle mottled green.
Fists then. And Hartley collapsing as the lights came on, and McGuire, dripping wet at the door, shook out the words, “Is—is Smith killed?”
Smith wasn’t harmed. The shot had passed over him.
“This fool, this fool,” cried Rockwell, standing over Hartley’s numbed shape. “Greatest case in history and he tries to destroy it!”
Hartley came around, slowly. “I should’ve known. Smith warned you.”
“Nonsense, he—” Rockwell stopped, amazed. Yes. That sudden premonition crashing into his mind. Yes. Then he glared at Hartley. “Upstairs with you. You’re being locked in for the night. McGuire, you, too. So you can watch him.”
McGuire croaked. “Hartley’s hand. Look at it. It’s green. It was Hartley in the hall—not Smith!”
Hartley stared at his fingers. “Pretty, isn’t it?” he said, bitterly. “I was in range of those radiations for a long time at the start of Smith’s illness. I’m going to be a—creature—like Smith. It’s been this way for several days. I kept it hidden. I tried not to say anything. Tonight, I couldn’t stand it any longer, and I came back to destroy Smith for what he’s done to me …”
A dry noise racked, dryly, splitting the air. The three of them froze.
Three tiny flakes of Smith’s chrysalis flicked up and then spiraled down to the floor.
Instantly, Rockwell was to the table, and gaping.
“It’s starting to crack. From the collar-bone to the navel, a miscroscopic fissure! He’ll be out of his chrysalis soon!”
McGuire’s jowls trembled. “And then what?”
Hartley’s words were bitter sharp. “We’ll have a superman. Question: what does a superman look like? Answer: nobody knows.”
Another crust of flakes crackled open.
McGuire shivered. “Will you try to talk to him?”
“Certainly.”
“Since when do—butterflies—speak?”
“Oh, Good God, McGuire!”
With the two others securely imprisoned upstairs, Rockwell locked himself into Smith’s room and bedded down on a cot, prepared to wait through the long wet night, watching, listening, thinking.
Watching the tiny flakes flicking off the crumbling skin of chrysalis as the Unknown within struggled quietly outward.
Just a few more hours to wait. The rain slid over the house, pattering.
What would Smith look like? A change in the earcups perhaps for greater hearing; extra eyes, maybe; a change in the skull structure, the facial setup, the bones of the body, the placement of organs, the texture of skin, a million and one changes.
Rockwell grew tired and yet was afraid to sleep. Eyelids heavy, heavy. What if he was wrong? What if his theory was entirely disjointed?
What if Smith was only so much moving jelly inside? What if Smith was mad, insane—so different that he’d be a world menace?
No. No. Rockwell shook his head groggily. Smith was perfect.
Perfect. There’d be no room for evil thought in Smith. Perfect.
The sanitarium was death quiet. The only noise was the faint crackle of chrysalis flakes skimming to the hard floor …
Rockwell slept. Sinking into the darkness that blotted out the room as dreams moved in upon him. Dreams in which Smith arose, walked in stiff, parched gesticulations and Hartley, screaming, wielded an ax, shining, again and again into the green armor of the creature and hacked it into liquid horror.
Dreams in which McGuire ran babbling through a rain of blood. Dreams in which—
Hot sunlight. Hot sunlight all over the room. It was morning.
Rockwell rubbed his eyes, vaguely troubled by the fact that someone had raised the blinds. Someone had—he leaped! Sunlight! There was no way for the blinds to be up. They’d been down for weeks! He cried out.
The door was open. The sanitarium was silent. Hardly daring to turn his head, Rockwell glanced at the table. Smith should have been lying there.
He wasn’t.
There was nothing but sunlight on the table. That— and a few remnants of shattered chrysalis. Remnants.
Brittle shards, a discarded profile cleft in two pieces, a shell segment that had been a thigh, a trace of arm, a splint of chest—these were the fractured remains of Smith!
Smith was gone. Rockwell staggered to the table, crushed. Scrabbling like a child among the rattling papyrus of skin. Then he swung about, as if drunk, and swayed out of the room and pounded up the stairs, shouting:
“Hartley! What did you do with him? Hartley! Did you think you could kill him, dispose of his body, and leave a few bits of shell behind to throw me off trail?”
The door to the room where McGuire and Hartley had slept was locked. Fumbling, Rockwell unlocked it. Both McGuire and Hartley were there.
“You’re here,” said Rockwell, dazed. “You weren’t downstairs, then.
Or did you unlock the door, come down, break in, kill Smith and—no, no.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Smith’s gone! McGuire, did Hartley move out of this room?”
“Not all night.’*
“Then—there’s only one explanation—Smith emerged from his chrysalis and escaped during the night! I’ll never see him, I’ll never get to see him, damn it! What a fool I was to sleep!”
“That settles it!” declared Hartley. “The man’s dangerous or he would have stayed and let us see him! God only knows what he is.”
“We’ve got to search, then. He can’t be far off. We’ve got to search then! Quick now. Hartley. McGuire!”
McGuire sat heavily down. “I won’t budge. Let him find himself. I’ve had enough.”
Rockwell didn’t wait to hear more. He went downstairs with Hartley close after him. McGuire puffed down a few moments later.
Rockwell moved wildly down the hall, halted at the wide windows that overlooked the desert and the mountains with morning shining over them.
He squinted out, and wondered if there was any chance at all of finding Smith. The first superbeing. The first perhaps in a new long line. Rockwell sweated. Smith wouldn’t leave without revealing himself to at least Rockwell.
He couldn’t leave. Or could he?
The kitchen door swung open, slowly.
A foot stepped through the door, followed by another. A hand lifted against the wall. Cigarette smoke moved from pursed lips.
“Somebody looking for me?”
Stunned, Rockwell turned. He saw the expression on Hartley’s face, heard McGuire choke with surprise. The three of them spoke one word together, as if given their cue:
“Smith.”
Smith exhaled cigarette smoke. His face was red-pink as he had been sunburnt, his eyes were glittering blue.
He was barefoot and his nude body was attired in one of Rockwell’s old robes.
“Would you mind telling me where I am? What have I been doing for the last three or four months? Is this a—hospital or isn’t it?”
Dismay slammed Rockwell’s mind, hard. He swallowed.
“Hello. I. That is— Don’t you remember—anything?”
Smith displayed his fingertips. “I recall turning green, if that’s what you mean. Beyond that—nothing.” He raked his pink hand through his nut-brown hair with the vigor of a creature newborn and glad to breathe again.
Rockwell slumped back against the wall. He raised his hands, with shock, to his eyes, and shook his head. Not believing what he saw he said,
“What time did you come out of the chrysalis?’*
“What time did I come out of—what?”
Rockwell took him down the hall to the next room and pointed to the table.
“I don’t see what you mean,” said Smith, frankly sincere. “I found myself standing in this room half an hour ago, stark naked.”
“That’s all?” said McGuire, hopefully. He seemed relieved.
Rockwell explained the origin of the chrysalis on the table.
Smith frowned. “That’s ridiculous. Who are you?”
Rockwell introduced the others.
Smith scowled at Hartley. “When I first was sick you came, didn’t you. I remember. At the radiations plant. But this is silly. What disease was it?”
Hartley’s cheek muscles were taut wire. “No disease. Don’t you know anything about it?”
“I find myself with strange people in a strange sanitarium. I find myself naked in a room with a man sleeping on a cot. I walk around the sanitarium, hungry. I go to the kitchen, find food, eat, hear excited voices, and then am accused of emerging from a chrysalis. What am I supposed to think?
Thanks, by the way, for this robe, for food, and the cigarette I borrowed. I didn’t want to wake you at first, Mr. Rockwell. I didn’t know who you were and you looked dead tired.”
“Oh, that’s all right.’ Rockwell wouldn’t let himself believe it.
Everything was crumbling. With every word Smith spoke, his hopes were pulled apart like the crumpled chrysalis. “How do you feel?”
“Fine. Strong. Remarkable, when you consider how long I was under.”
“Very remarkable,” said Hartley.
“You can imagine how I felt when I saw the calendar. All those months—crack—gone. I wondered what I’d been doing all that time.”
“So have we.”
McGuire laughed. “Oh, leave him alone, Hartley. Just because you hated him—”
“Hated?” Smith’s brows went up. “Me? Why?”
“Here. This is why!” Hartley thrust his fingers out “Your damned radiations. Night after night sitting by you in your laboratory. What can I do about it?”
“Hartley,” warned Rockwell. “Sit down. Be quiet.”
“I won’t sit down and I won’t be quiet! Are you both fooled by this imitation of a man, this pink fellow who’s carrying on the greatest hoax in history? If you had any sense you’d destroy Smith before he escapes!”
Rockwell apologized for Hartley’s outburst.
Smith shook his head. “No, let him talk. What’s this about?”
“You know already!” shouted Hartley, angrily. “You’ve lain there for months, listening, planning. You can’t fool me. You’ve got Rockwell bluffed, disappointed. He expected you to be a superman. Maybe you are. But whatever you are, you’re not Smith any more. Not any more. It’s just another of your misdirections. We weren’t supposed to know all about you, and the world shouldn’t know about you. You could kill us, easily, but you’d prefer to stay and convince us that you’re normal. That’s the best way. You could have escaped a few minutes ago, but that would have left the seeds of suspicion behind. Instead, you waited, to convince us that you’re normal.”
“He is normal,” complained McGuire.
“No he’s not. His mind’s different. He’s clever.’*
“Give him word association tests then,” said McGuire.
“He’s too clever for that, too.”
“It’s very simple, then. We take blood tests, listen to his heart, and inject serums into him.”
Smith looked dubious. “I feel like an experiment, but if you really want to. This is silly.”
That shocked Hartley. He looked at Rockwell. “Get the hypos,” he said.
Rockwell got the hypos, thinking. Now, maybe after all, Smith was a superman. His blood. That super-blood. Its ability to kill germs. His heartbeat.
His breathing. Maybe Smith was a superman and didn’t know it. Yes. Yes, maybe—
Rockwell drew blood from Smith and slid it under a microscope. His shoulders sagged. It was normal blood. When you dropped germs into it the germs took a normal length of time to die. The blood was no longer super germicidal. The x-liquid, too, was gone. Rockwell sighed miserably. Smith’s temperature was normal. So was his pulse. His sensory and nervous system responded according to rule.
“Well, that takes care of that,” said Rockwell, softly.
Hartley sank into a chair, eyes widened, holding his head between bony fingers. He exhaled. “I’m sorry. I guess my—mind—it just imagined things. The months were so long. Night after night. I got obsessed, and afraid.
I’ve made a fool out of myself. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He stared at his green fingers. “But what about myself?”
Smith said, “I recovered. You’ll recover, too, I guess. I can sympathize with you. But it wasn’t bad … I don’t really recall anything.”
Hartley relaxed. “But—yes I guess you’re right. I don’t like the idea of my body getting hard, but it can’t be helped. I’ll be all right.”
Rockwell was sick. The tremendous letdown was too much for him.
The intense drive, the eagerness, the hunger and curiosity, the fire, had all sunk within him.
So this was the man from the chrysalis? The same man who had gone m. All this waiting and wondering for nothing.
He gulped a breath of air, tried to steady his innermost, racing thoughts. Turmoil. This pink-cheeked, fresh-voiced man who sat before him smoking calmly, was no more than a man who had suffered some partial skin petrification, and whose glands had gone wild from radiation, but, nevertheless, just a man now and nothing more. Rockwell’s mind, his overimaginative, fantastic mind had seized upon each facet of the illness and built it into a perfect organism of wishful thinking. Rockwell was deeply shocked, deeply stirred and disappointed.
The question of Smith’s living without food, his pure blood, low temperature, and the other evidences of superiority were now fragments of a strange illness. An illness and nothing more. Something that was over, down and gone and left nothing behind but brittle scraps on a sunlit tabletop.
There’d be a chance to watch Hartley now, if his illness progressed, and report the new sickness to the medical world.
But Rockwell didn’t care about illness. He cared about perfection.
And that perfection had been split and ripped and torn and it was gone. His dream^ was gone. His supercreature was gone. He didn’t care if the whole world went hard, green, brittle-mad now.
Smith was shaking hands all around. “I’d better get back to Los Angeles. Important work for me to do at the plant. I have my old job waiting for me. Sorry I can’t stay on. You understand.”
“You should stay on and rest a few days, at least,” said Rockwell. He hated to see the last wisp of his dream vanish.
“No thanks. I’ll drop by your office in a week or so for another checkup, though. Doctor, if you like? I’ll drop in every few weeks for the next year or so so you can check me, yes?”
“Yes. Yes,’smith. Do that, will you please? I’d like to talk your illness over with you. You’re lucky to be alive.”
McGuire said, happily, “I’ll drive you to L.A.”
“Don’t bother. I’ll walk to Tujunga and get a cab. I want to walk. It’s been so long, I want to see what it feels like.”
Rockwell lent him an old pair of shoes and an old suit of clothes.
“Thanks, Doctor. I’ll pay you what I owe you as soon as possible.”
“You don’t owe me a penny. It was interesting.”
“Well, good-bye, Doctor. Mr. McGuire. Hartley.”
“Good-bye, Smith.”
“Good-bye.”
Smith walked down the path to the dry wash, which was already baked dry by the late afternoon sun. He walked easily and happily and whistled. I wish I could whistle now, thought Rockwell tiredly.
Smith turned once, waved to them, and then he strode up the hillside and went on over it toward the distant city.
Rockwell watched him go as a small child watches his favorite sand castle eroded and annihilated by the waves of the sea. “I can’t believe it,” he said, over and over again. “I can’t believe it. The whole thing’s ending so soon, so abruptly for me. I’m dull and empty inside.”
“Everything looks rosy to me!” chuckled McGuire happily.
Hartley stood in the sun. His green hands hung softly at his side and his white face was really relaxed for the first time in months, Rockwell realized. Hartley said, softly,
“I’ll come out all right. I’ll come out all right. Oh, thank God for that.
Thank God for that. I won’t be a monster. I won’t be anything but myself.” He turned to Rockwell. “Just remember, remember, don’t let them bury me by mistake. Don’t let them bury me by mistake, thinking I’m dead. Remember that.”
Smith took the path across the dry wash and up the hill. It was late afternoon already and the sun had started to vanish behind blue hills. A few stars were visible. The odor of water, dust, and distant orange blossoms hung in the warm air.
Wind stirred. Smith took deep breaths of air. He walked.
Out of sight, away from the sanitarium, he paused and stood very still. He looked up at the sky.
Tossing away the cigarette he’d been smoking, he mashed it precisely under one heel. Then he straightened his well-shaped body, tossed his brown hair back, closed his eyes, swallowed, and relaxed his fingers at his sides.
With nothing of effort, just a little murmur of sound, Smith lifted his body gently from the ground into the warm air.
He soared up quickly, quietly—and- very soon he was lost among the stars as Smith headed for outer space …
…
…
The End
Conclusion
When you all tell me your stories, about how you have changed since arriving at MM… well, this is always what comes to mind.
And this is only the beginning.
Who knows what greatness lies in the futures ahead of you?
I’ve been running my affirmation campaigns driving the results towards “general peace and calmness” along the lines of what I experienced as a young boy growing up in the 1960’s. In those days, my Summers were filled with a calmness, a warmth and an unhurried lifestyle that reflected everyone around me. And after the extremely hectic life of the last decades, I have finally decided to put my foot down and yell STOP! at the top of my lungs.
And of course. My affirmation campaigns always work.
As a result everything is really slowing down all around me. Everything is slower. Calmer. Better. Kinder. Softer.
I do not know how great this influence is, and whether it can cross the oceans and influence other MM readers, but there is a great noticeable difference around me and my reality.
Everything is so much slower. So much more relaxed. It is unhurried. It is not frantic. It is soft like soft butter, and slow like a tranquil Summer pond, and peaceful like a bubbling brook under the deep shade of deep dark trees.
Back in the 1960’s, as a boy, the only thing that I needed to worry about was the big tureen of spaghetti sauce simmering on the stove and filling the house with the luscious smells, the occasional slam of the screen porch door in the kitchen, and the dogs in the back yard wanting to go for a walk. In those days, the only concerns that I had were my friends who wanted to ride their bikes with me and go exploring in the woods, and my sister talking on the phone.
This is a “feeling” an overall “quality” that permeates everything in my life right now. And since it does, I find that art from one hundred years ago seems to resonate with me. And this is one such artist that painted those times. And when I view these paintings I can easily see how calm and unhurried those days were.
1922. Oil on canvas. 89 x 119 cms | 35 x 46 3/4 ins. Currently located at Penlee House| Penzance| United Kingdom
Look at the picture. Notice what the children are doing in the background? Notice the pace of the boy leading the horses. Notice the way the horses are behaving. What about the weather.
It’s all calm.
It’s all unhurried. Pleasant. Easy. Soft. Clear. Nice.
The Fishermen’s Expedition
61 x 77.5 cms | 24 x 30 1/2 ins
Oil on canvas
Yet another calm, and relaxed scene. You can almost hear the splashing of the water against the wooden hull of the boat.
1900. Oil on canvas. 174 x 152.5 cms | 68 1/2 x 60 ins. Presently at Oldham Art Gallery| Oldham| United Kingdom
I like this late afternoon image. The horse drinking from the cool pool. The man on the horse pausing for a rest. The deepening gloom under the trees. Really lovely.
1886. Oil on canvas. 119.5 x 156 cms | 47 x 61 1/4 ins. At Walker Art Gallery| Liverpool| United Kingdom
It carries you off. Have you ever been on a fishing sailboat? Well this was what it was like. I do love the way he painted the water on the deck. And the details on the sails.
Again. Just average people having an average day. You can just imagine this, can’t you? A calm unhurried life. No one screaming at you through media to buy! Buy! Buy!, or news about some great pronouncement for war, laws, or taxes. All is just devoid of all that bullshit.
I really love the colors and the proud, broad strokes. Obviously the idea of a horse and wagon carrying produce is well before my time, I do remember my grandmother in Pittsburgh getting fresh vegetables delivered in a horse drawn wagon with radial tires. Of course this was in the late 70’s and early 80’s.
Dusk is my favorite time in the night. Here in Southern China, when the sun starts to set a cool breeze develops and the temperatures drop to nice manageable levels. People go outside to play, chat, have a meal, or just to sit. It’s really quite lovely. I love the collie in the lower left hand corner of the picture.
Amongst the Pines
111.8 x 137.2 cms | 44 x 54 ins
Oil on canvas
This speaks to me. I can’t for the life of me understand why. But it does. Maybe it reminds me of the pine groves near the lake in Erie. Or perhaps a forest trail, or the edge of a gold course. What ever, it’s a really calm and pleasant image. Having this painting grace my living room would be really lovely.
1918. Oil on canvas. 106.6 x 137.1 cms | 41 3/4 x 53 3/4 ins. Imperial War Museum London| London| United Kingdom
An interesting painting and would make for some great conversation. I really love the artist and his style. It effectively captures the mood at the vision at that time. Really quite lovely.
The Seine Boat
Another powerful painting. I wonder what they are looking at. Calm. Unhurried. Relaxed. Thoughtful. What happened to the human race?
A lovely vision of a busy train station. Not really “my cup of tea”, but actually well done and calm. I just cannot imagine anything being as noisy and boisterous as your would find today.
1894. Oil on canvas. 61.3 x 77.2 cms | 24 x 30 1/4 ins. National Museum of Wales| Cardiff| United Kingdom
I’ve never been in an actual smithy. I walked by one in an Amish community, and it did look a little bit like this. I also, as a boy, used to play in an old boarded up shed that at one time was a blacksmith. (You could tell by the faded letters on the front of the building.) We used to go root around in there getting old newspapers, old bottles and crocks.
Again. Lovely colors. Relaxing. Calm and pleasant.
Conclusion
I do hope that you enjoyed this nice visit to my art presentation. I hope that it means as much to you as it does for me. In any event, have a great day. Spend some time with your little guys (pets) , friends and loved ones, and go by yourself a Snickers candy bar. Enjoy the little things.
Do you want more?
I have more articles like this in my Art Index here…
This man was a great artist. Luigi Crosio was an Italian painter who lived and worked in Turin, Italy. He died in Turin and is recorded as having been born in Alba, but the town of Acqui Terme, a few miles south of Alba, claims Crosio was born there.
Luigi Crosio was born in Alba, Italy in 1835 and died in Turin, 1915. He often painted religious works for the Kuenzli Brothers in Switzerland. This company specialised in religious and pious works for printing and distribution. There was a legal case in the 1890s regarding his painting Refuge of Sinners. This was his most successful image and another artist claimed the copyright for it. However, the Kuenzli Brothers produced photographs that showed the face of the Virgin was based on the face of one of Crosio’s daughters. The last work that Crosio is recorded having painted for the Kuenzli Brothers was in 1911.
He was survived by Annette Crosio, one of several daughters, who is known to have been still living in Turin in 1923.
The Beautiful Slave
This is an “Orientalist” painting that depicts a man buying a female slave. One of my favorite art genres is the “Orientalist” imagery as depicted by the romantic painters of Europe one hundred years ago.
78.7 x 54.6 cms | 30 3/4 x 21 1/4 ins
Oil on Canvas
Here, we see the relationship between the older sister and the younger sister as she arrives home. Note the possessive guardian stance of the loyal dog, and the open book of poetry next to the chair.
Oil on canvas
91.4 x 67.3 cms | 35 3/4 x 26 1/4 ins
New Friends
Paintings of ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt were always popular with these period painters. As an artist, I really enjoy the cool darkness of the nearby shrine, and the impression of a lovely day of moderate temperature.The goat is a nice touch, but I do love the rendered folds on the black woman’s dress.
Oil On Panel
A visit to an Art Museum
When was the last time that you visited an art museum? Be honest. It’s not the kind of thing you do every day. And unless you live in a city, it’s maybe a once every decade event.
In America, of course, all of the museums have turned into a for-profit model. So if you want to look at some art, sculptures, and walk around in the galleries, you must pay an entrance fee. Not so in China. Most are open to the public. Though, Hong Kong, in deference to the influence of the British Empire has also adopted the for-profit model.
All museums (well most) have a discount or “free” day. And you can go visit the museum and not have to worry about the fees. When I lived in Woonsockett, RI there was a historical museum of the city nearby, and they wanted $35 per person to go in. That’s pretty steep, and that was maybe 25 years ago.
To see what “specials” or events that the museums have, you just go to their web page. You might be surprised. I will tell you that going out to a museum is a great activity and a heck of a lot of fun. Then afterwards go out and eat a nice meal. Always a great activity.
Art museums tend to be fun. You go into the new progressive art section and will laugh at what people think is art, while you might go up and down corridors with nothing but tranquil landscapes. I always loved the statues, and that section of the museums.
In today’s really crazy world…
…perhaps a nice visit to a museum might be in order.
Types of Museums
There are different types of museums. Here are some of them:
Archaeology museums. They display archeological artifacts. They can be open-air museums or they can exhibit items in a building.
Art museums. Also known as art galleries. They are spaces for showing art objects, most commonly visual art objects as paintings, sculpture, photography, illustrations, drawings, ceramics or metalwork. First publicly owned art museum in Europe was Amerbach-Cabinet in Basel (Now Kunstmuseum Basel).
Encyclopedic museums. They are usually large institutions and they offer visitors a wide variety of information on many themes, both local and global. They are not thematically defined nor specialized.
Historic house museums. A house or a building turned into a museum for a variety of reasons, most commonly because the person that lived in it was important or something important happened in it. House is often equipped with furniture like it was in the time when it was used. Visitors of the house learn through guides that tell story of the house and its inhabitants.
History museums. They collect objects and artifacts that tell a chronological story about particular locality. Objects that are collected could be documents, artifacts, archeological findings and other. They could be in a building, historic house or a historic site.
Living history museums. Type of a museum in which historic events are performed by actors to immerse a viewer and show how certain events looked like or how some crafts were performed because there is no other way to see them now because they are obsolete.
Maritime museums. Specialized museums for displaying maritime history, culture or archaeology. Primarily archaeological maritime museums exhibit artifacts and preserved shipwrecks recovered from bodies of water. Maritime history museums, show and educate the public about humanity’s maritime past.
Military and war museums. Museums specialized in military histories. Usually organized from a point of view of a one nation and conflicts in which that country has taken part. They collect and present weapons, uniforms, decorations, war technology and other objects.
Mobile museums. Museums that have no specific strict place of exhibiting. They could be exhibited from a vehicle or they could move from museum to museum as guests. Also a name for a parts of exhibitions of a museum that are sent to another museum.
Natural history museums. Usually display objects from nature like stuffed animals or pressed plants. They educate about natural history, dinosaurs, zoology, oceanography, anthropology, evolution, environmental issues, and more.
Open-air museums. Characteristic for exhibiting outdoors. Exhibitions consist of buildings that recreate architecture from the past. First opened in Scandinavia near the end of the 19th century.
Pop-up museums. Nontraditional museum institutions. Made to last short and often relying on visitors to provide museum objects and labels while professionals or institution only provide theme. With that is constructed shared historical authority.
Science museums. Specialized for science and history of science. In the beginning they were static displays of objects but now they are made so the visitors can participate and that way better learn about different branches of science.
I like to believe that you will surprised by the large number of museums around you. You simply go to the local library, and go up to the librarian there and ask them where the local museums are. You will find city, state, and country historical museums. Natural museum for such things as local wildlife, and butterflies (great fun that one!). And many more.
Planning
If you did your research, you might discover that the local country historical museum is open to the public and free, but is only open two days a week.
Or you might discover a local national history museum is free but asks for donations.
Just plan out your event. I urge going budget, keeping in mind that the idea is not to tantalize the children, but for you all to have a nice outings with those you care about.
Pick a museum.
Pick a date.
Plan the trip.
Pick an unusual restaurant to make it special.
Special Meals?
What do I mean by special meals? Well, I mean that you go out and find a restaurant to eat in. NOT FAST FOOD.
A family Italian restaurant.
A seafood, or local restaurant that has good cheap prices. (I once found a Cuban restaurant in the middle of nowhere. I ate delicious food that I never had since.)
A diner that is out of one of those old fashioned diner cars.
A place that makes their own ginger beer.
A place that is listed in the local community newspapers as “unique” or “special” or that has a story that is interesting.
Maybe your budget is so slim that you cannot afford a real mean. Then consider an after museum picnic. And just plan where to go, and BBQ some chicken, or meat, And relax in the countryside.
The idea is, of course, to have a low budget fun and special time with those you love and appreciate.
Final thoughts
There is no reason why you can’t have fun regardless of your personal situation. If you are working, then take the time off. If you are not working, then go when no one else is around.
Keep in mind, from a budget point of view, the cheapest meals are breakfasts.
You would be so very surprised at how cheap two eggs, toast, and baked beans (fried potatoes) are with a cup of coffee.
Get up early, have a weekday early breakfast in a diner, then go to the museum.
Have a great time.
Take a ton of “selfies”, and then head home.
Also, keep in mind that State Parks usually have cabins to rent, and that they are dirt cheap. But you have to reserve them months in advance.
Some of the most remarkable times that I ever had was staying in some of these (bare) cabins, and going out and tromping though the state forest paths at night under a full moon, or attending the local recreation of a log cabin community at night.
Magical times.
And the smells of the wood smoke and the fires were mystical.
Note that the prices can vary from $5 to $35 a night. The cabins will be bare. With just a mattress, and a table and chairs. There will be a nice fireplace, and a cord of wood to use. Some may have electricity. Some might have such things as refrigerators and other amenities, but don’t count on it.
Just check out the local webpage of the park that you are interested in visiting.
Do you want more?
I have more articles like this in my Art Index here…
Well it is true. I discovered this sound while looking for information on vintage cast iron doorstops and came across an article on the subject. then I went on Kouguo and started download the tunes. Wow! Quite an unusual sound.
How to describe it?
Have you ever woken up on the couch in the middle of the night to find yourself staring at a black-and-white movie from the 1930s flickering on the TV? If so, your slumber may have been gently stirred by the film’s melancholy soundtrack.
Drifting between dream-state and consciousness, at first you may think you recognize the tinny strains of a slow Argentine tango, but then you discern a melody suggesting a Chopin nocturne, albeit one that’s been tuned to an even gloomier minor key of an Eastern European klezmer dance number. Perhaps you’re still dreaming?
In fact, you’re wide awake, and what you’re hearing is a Hollywoodized version of Polish tango.
It’s a popular genre of sentimental songs composed between 1918 and 1939 by classically trained Polish musicians.
“That’s the soundtrack of interwar Poland,”
…says Juliette Bretan, a journalist and researcher based in Lincolnshire and studying in London.
“The music is very melodramatic and really rather sad, filled with these depressing lyrics about people wanting to take their own lives, or the fights they’re having with their lovers. But it’s also a very mature sound, a very Polish sound. Had World War II not happened,”
She adds,
“I believe Polish music would’ve had an even bigger impact than it did on the global stage.”
Bretan has been on a mission to learn about her Eastern European roots.
“We know my grandmother was taken from Poland in 1941 to perform slave labor in Germany,”
Bretan says.
“We think she was in some camps for a time, but it’s very unclear. After the war, she met my granddad in a displaced-persons’ camp, but we don’t really know what happened to him before that. They married and then came here in ’46 or ’47, and that was that.”
As Bretan delved into her family’s history, Polish tango became her soundtrack.
“I stumbled onto this music purely by chance,”
she says.
“I find the sound intoxicating, so it became a connection to the world my grandparents would’ve known when they were living in Poland. On the one hand, for me, the music is like a reconnection to my heritage, but on the other hand, what is there to reconnect to? That heritage is all gone, so it’s almost like I’m writing a new history of my family.”
Bretan fell hard for Polish tango, which, in an article for culture.pl, she described as
“merging pinches of the age-old Polish romantic and sentimental melodies with Jewish inflections and a more modern, brassy sound, dripping in glissandos and vibrato.”
There is some very interesting background on all this regarding the inter-war years when Germany embraced nationalism in the form of Nazi Facism. But I really don’t have the stomach to get into that right now. I just want to enjoy the music.
History
Tango was first introduced to Poland in 1913, with the performance of Victor Jacobi’s opera Targ na Dziewczęta (Girls’ Market) at the New Theatre in Warsaw. Its popularity over the following years grew not from palpable influences, but gramophone records, the radio and newspaper reports.
This popular consumption through media prompted Polish tangos to carve their own position in the history of the nation’s music: with a lack of direct contact, pieces began to veer away from the original Argentinian form, adopting a more melancholic sound influenced heavily by klezmer, and a softer melody and harmony; replacing the underlying rhythm of the stereotypical bandoneon with a proliferation of slides and rigorous vibrato. Theirs was a journey that blossomed along with the Polish state itself – these tangos were bulwarks of a new, revitalised Polish popular culture.
In 1925, Henryk Gold and his brother Artur established the Gold Orchestra, an 8-piece jazz band that played regularly at the Cafe Bodega in Warsaw. At first, the orchestra exclusively played ragtime, but soon, with the echoes of a more exotic yet wistful sound creeping across the continent, it slowly began to dabble with tangos and waltzes, styles that would become the pair’s legacy.
A year later in 1926, Artur Gold and his cousin, Jerzy Petersburski, co-founded the Petersburski & Gold Orchestra. By the end of the decade, it was one of the most renowned dance orchestras in Warsaw, performing in the fashionable Adria restaurant.
Alongside this development was the growth in popularity of theatres and cabarets, the most significant being the Qui Pro Quo theatre, led largely by Julian Tuwim and Marian Hemar, and, later, the Morskie Oko cabaret.
These two groups competed fiercely to recruit the best Polish stars of the interbellum era: artists like the now legendary Eugeniusz Bodo (often pictured with his dog, Sambo) and Mieczysław Fogg, who performed alongside Mira Zimińska, Zula Pogorzelska, Adolf Dymsza, and the smouldering Hanka Ordonówna.
Experiments in 1920s music, which at the time were coming thick and fast, now had epicentres from which new innovations and styles could thrive: Poland was beginning to embrace tango-fever like nothing else.
The Wall Street Crash and subsequent global economic downturn in the late 1920s hit entertainment establishments hard. Both Qui Pro Quo and Morskie Oko closed in 1933 – but the music passionately cultivated by the artists of these clubs only played louder, and interest in the style swelled. By the 1930s, Poland – and particularly Warsaw – was seeping with the sensuous melancholic passion of the tango, with new tunes churned out on a daily basis.
Above all, the record company Syrena Rekord, Poland’s first and arguably most eminent recording company, helped facilitated the development of this culture. Established in 1908 by Juliusz Feigenbaum to satisfy the Polish demand for popular music, Syrena Rekord was already booming on the eve of WWI, producing 2.5 million records a year.
But it was after the war that the popularity of the company truly soared: where other record companies fell following the economic depression, Syrena jumped from strength to strength.
The music of 1930s Poland that Wars helped produce was influenced not only by traditional Polish countryside folk motifs, but also by the cosmopolitan nature of the interwar state: after regaining independence, the Polish nation exploded in freedoms of cultures, languages and lifestyles, with Warsaw the pivot. Entertainment united these disparate voices in a pleasant environment, providing a means by which any style could be heard and appreciated.
This was particularly true for the Jewish population, who were integral to the Polish interwar music scene. Jewish composers, singers, songwriters and musicians, many of whom originated from families steeped in traditions of classical music, found liberty in popular culture, combining their efforts with other previously-silenced minorities and cultivating an original sound for the new nation.
The Syrena founder Feigenbaum himself epitomised this atmosphere: a Catholic of Jewish descent, he worked as a musician, composer, inventor and businessman – the ultimate cosmopolitan multi-talent that inspired a generation of Poles to follow.
Though Polish Radio was the driver behind the record business at the time, they only wanted to push the most renowned artists – making Syrena the only medium by which all the Polish popular music of the period, all the new melodies and styles and flairs, could reach the heights of fame. Waltzes like Szklanka Wina – Fest Dziewczyna!, slow-foxes like Już Jestem Taka Głupia, and foxtrots like Nikodem and Tokaj perpetually quavered from gramophones and echoed out of the doors of fashionable nightclubs across the country in the 1930s.
But it was the wealth of unique tango sounds that the Polish population craved the most. With its influences from Eastern European, Jewish and Gypsy music, these particular interbellum pieces spoke to the population like no other music could: a population characterised by a tumultuous history, an investment in multi-culture, and the desire for sophistication and charm.
Poles of the 1930s were allured by the exotic yearning desire of such music: the quivering Slavic intonations, the broken passion, and enigmatic performers. The artists themselves sustained the vision through the adoption of a multiplicity of enthralling pseudonyms, adding a soupçon of piquant mystery to the culture.
Biggest hits
The breakout tango hit of Syrena happened early: in 1929, Petersburski’s Tango Milonga [provided below] (with lyrics by Andrzej Włast) burst onto the scene and quickly became not only a national favourite but also a widespread international triumph, with the English title being Oh Donna Clara. The aching cadences and swelling Eastern European melody gave the piece a lively originality, and it is no wonder that it is still remembered by many as a classic interwar tune.
But there were also other tangos which had a momentous impact in Poland. The popular Umówiłem Się z Nią na Dziewiątą premiered in 1937, sung by Eugeniusz Bodo, with a legacy that lasts even today. The yearning 1935 hit Graj Skrzypku, Graj portrayed by the rich voice of Adam Aston and the charming tones of Mieczysław Fogg, among many others, was characteristic of the tango culture emerging at the time.
Meanwhile, the 1932 piece Rebeka, and its 1934 complement Rebeka Tańczy Tango epitomised the figure of the heartbroken female lover, a trope found in so many tangos of the period. Another of Petersburski’s greats, the ominous lament To Ostatnia Niedziela, nicknamed ‘Suicide Tango’, came in 1935 and still remains a symbol of pre-war Polish culture.
Here’s some examples.
See if any of you find it appealing.
There’s something about violins, Accordion & Concertina music. It gives me the chills. I hope you all enjoy this playlist.
An Interview with Noam Zylberberg
From HERE. All credit to the author, and kindly note that it was edited to fit this venue.
It was an exciting time in music history – there was nothing to base these songs on. The result was something simple but not simplistic. That’s what I love about it,’ says Noam Zylberberg. The musician, who is performing Polish pieces written and composed in the Interwar period, told us about the sound he is trying to resurrect.
Noam Zylberberg studied conducting at the Jerusalem Academy of Music. He became fascinated with interwar Polish music and established Mała Orkiestra Dancingowa (The Little Dancing Orchestra), which has played concerts in Poland and abroad. Their first album was released this year.
Juliette Bretan: So let’s start from the beginning. Where do your links to Poland come from?
Noam Zylberberg: My grandparents were born in Warsaw but left Poland in 1934. They were young. They wanted to follow their ideals and reinvent themselves. My grandmother’s family were Warsaw people going back many generations and so Warsaw has always been present in my life.
JB: When did you begin to become more involved with Poland and Polish culture?
NZ: I became curious after my grandparents passed away – I was still very young, but I began wondering about their pasts. They never spoke Polish at home, but I’d heard about their lives and families in Warsaw. This fascination followed me into my student years and still does till this day.
JB:Did your interest in interwar Polish music begin from that period?
NZ: Not really; It was a long time until I discovered this music. It all started through an interesting family connection – one of my grandmother’s cousins, Tadeusz Raabe, was a friend of Antoni Słonimski’s. Tadeusz was from a wealthy background – his family owned a factory.
When World War I broke out, they had to leave to Russia. During those years, Tadeusz spent time in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. That was when he discovered their modern art cafés and avant-garde culture – which didn’t exist in Poland at all.
Back then, Poland was in the midst of the Young Poland movement; art was very serious and patriotic. So when Tadeusz returned home, he opened the first modern art café in the city with Antoni Słonimski, who in turn brought with him Julian Tuwim. This was the famous Pod Picadorem cafe.
Later, he also married a well-known singer and movie star, Tola Mankiewiczówna. When I first learned about this, her name meant nothing to me. I found a video online of her singing the tango Odrobinę Szczęścia w Miłości (A Little Luck in Love). If I’m honest, I wasn’t that taken by it – it’s a video of her dressed as a maid, shining a shoe, and at that time I didn’t understand Polish, so I didn’t know what she was singing about.
JB: And when were you taken by these songs?
NZ: I gradually became more familiar with these songs, and as I started to learn about different individuals and pieces I began to think that it would be cool to do something with them, though I didn’t exactly know what. There was something special about these pieces. I was interested in the sound – it’s such a specific sound of the 1920s and 1930s.
The main genre of this style is the Tango.
It was popular all over Europe in the early years of the 20th century, but its life in Warsaw was longer than abroad. Tango was being danced to in Warsaw in the 1920s, but it was only towards the end of that decade that the local musicians began composing them. The first initiative was taken by Jerzy Petersburski and his cousins, the Gold brothers.
JB: What makes a tango Polish?
It’s difficult to answer the question of what makes a Polish tango. I don’t know if I have a good answer, but I suppose there’s a certain softness; the basics of tango are there, but everything else is from a different world. There’s a different warmth to it; it’s less aggressive.
One good example of a Polish tango is O Piękna Nieznajoma (O Beautiful Unknown Woman). It’s split into two parts – a chorus and an interlude. It’s very soft and lyrical; there’s an elegant countermelody in the background; it’s very sophisticated. It sounds almost like an aria from a Puccini opera. When the intersection comes, it’s like a reminder– ‘this is tango!’
That part is as if not connected to the rest of the song, and when the main theme returns, you can almost forget that it’s really a tango: the only thing that suggests tango at the beginning is the rhythm, like an engine in the background. Everything else is water.
JB: And what about the multicultural aspects of Poland back then – the mix of Poles and Jews and Ukrainians and other minorities?
NZ: It was multicultural – but they were all Poles. They all spoke the same language. Most of the Jewish composers and musicians came from assimilated families. They may have come from different backgrounds, but they shared similar values. Almost all of them were professional musicians, and they all received classical musical education.
They knew what they were doing – if they used a Jewish-sounding motive, it was done deliberately. The same way they also wrote songs in Spanish style about Spain, even though most of them probably hadn’t been there – for the audience, going to the cabarets and the theatres was their way of travelling and accessing something exotic.
They worked quickly. A piece composed one morning could be played the same evening. If something didn’t work the way they’d hoped, they could change it the next day. This way of work is like experimenting in a laboratory. This allowed a new style to take shape relatively quickly. They were even writing for particular musicians, basing their arrangements on who would be in the band on any particular day. One day, they might have three clarinets – so they would arrange the piece for them. The next day, they might have one – and so the next arrangement would be different.
The specific musicians and instruments played a big role in shaping this style. This is what differed it from early pop music played in Berlin or London at the same time.
JB:How were the instruments different?
NZ: A good example is the Hawaiian guitar, which features in so many songs from the period. The main musician playing it was a man called Wiktor Tychowski – he was crazy about the Hawaiian guitar. It’s actually him playing it in a lot of these recordings – the other musicians probably liked working with him – it featured so much that eventually it became a characteristic of the style. Tychowski was just one person but he left a mark – each of these individuals had influence.
JB:And what was the next step for you?
NZ: I spent a lot of time getting to know the style and the people, and then I went through the songs online and made transcriptions of them. Still in Tel Aviv, my idea was to collect a group of people together to play Polish tangos and have dance parties … you know, a very underground scene, playing in a dark basement with hipsters who don’t even look you in the eye – that kind of thing.
Eventually, I never actually set it up. Instead I started travelling to and from Warsaw and met up with some musicians in the city – and one day I just stayed. I spent my time making transcriptions and preparing scores – mostly tangos at that stage.
JB: So you said you transcribe these songs to be able to perform them?
NZ: Yes. When we talk about style, a lot of it has to do with instrumentation. The notes that were published and were available to the public have all the harmonic and melodic information but don’t include any instrumentation, so they’re not helpful for playing in the original style. So I use old recordings and transcribe them.
We try to follow the stylistic traditions of the time – it will never be 100% the same, and that’s not what we want. We’re different people living in a different world, and we’re not interested in imitation. But we try to think about it in similar terms to those in which they were thinking when they created it.
For example, the instruments didn’t change that much, but the technique and approach did. Back then violin players tended to use a lot of portamento – sliding from note to note. But today this is considered bad playing. I can’t ask my violinists to completely change their technique, but I want them to know about it. I want them to be informed, to listen and understand why it sounds the way it sounds.
JB: Do you think this music is coming back into fashion? There seem to be a lot of performers like you whose repertoires include these songs.
NZ: Yes, but each group is doing it differently. There’s room for everyone.
JB: Has this sound always been here, or did it dissipate in 1939?
NZ: In the late 1940s, for a few more years, you could still hear reminiscences of the style in Warsaw. But most of the musicians of the previous generation were gone by then – some perished in the war and other immigrated soon after – and the sound changed. The style back then was based on people; they made it the way it was.
JB: So what about those who survived and kept playing and singing – the best example being, of course, Mieczysław Fogg?
NZ: Fogg’s style changed – you could even say he was a different singer between the 1930s and the 1970s.
What Fogg did – what we owe him for the most – was to be a symbol. Because he was here, he became a symbol of old Warsaw. Some musicians who stayed couldn’t find themselves in the new world. But after the war, Fogg recorded the songs from the 1920s and 1930s in new versions. The songs Fogg didn’t record are mostly forgotten, and those he recorded are the ones we remember. He’s responsible for that.
JB: So what made the Interwar period special?
NZ: It was a peculiar and interesting time all over the world, and it was the beginning of pop culture. Before, there had been serious and folk music – but not pop. The world was changing quickly; technological advances and changes in the social structure changed the way people lived. Suddenly, you have recording and films that need music, and cities were getting larger. It was the first time in history when people had money and time and wanted to have fun. Consumers of culture grew, so there was a need for music.
This music had to be invented. There were questions – ‘How do you write a pop song?’ ‘How long should it be?’ ‘How should you sing one?’
Many of the early songs just don’t work anymore; they’re not relevant and no one speaks this way, so they can’t connect. But things changed – there was an influx of artists, many from Lwów (today’s Lviv), who could create charming rhymes and simple feelings.
JB: And how are your performances taking this into account? Are you performing at the moment?
NZ: There is still more to do – there always is. We perform at SPATiF [a club in Warsaw] regularly, and we have the album, which was produced with the support of Polish Radio.
Almost all of our musicians come from a classical background – they’re a bunch of people who are interested in exploring . None of them grew up with these sounds. This style is not natural for modern musicians. So we have to think: ‘How do we achieve this?’ So even just the way of thinking about the notes was something that we had to work out together.
One point is swing. Today, everyone knows what swing sounds like, but back then, it was something new and unnatural. When we started rehearsing, it sounded more like New York in the 1950s than Warsaw in the 1930s. We had to forget it. Even in concerts, I’ll remind the musicians not to swing. When you start swinging in these songs, everything falls apart and that engine dies. The piece gets heavier – it should be light.
JB: And do you have any favourite pieces?
NZ: One song which is close to me is Codziennie Inna (Different Every Day), which opens our album.
It wasn’t part of our original repertoire – but we had a concert in SPATiF and a couple of the musicians were running a little late. Eventually, we couldn’t wait any more so, in the meantime, I decided I would teach everyone a song. The orchestra didn’t know it either. They caught the melody, and the audience quickly learned the lyrics. By the end, everyone was singing together – it was a great experience.
These songs were a part of this city; these melodies were once hummed in the streets – but then they disappeared. When we did that concert with Codziennie Inna – the audience sang it 20 times. I’m sure it stuck in their heads. Some of them may have even hummed it to themselves on the street the next day.
It’s giving the city back its sounds.
Do you want more?
I have more articles like this in my Happiness Index here…
The story begins with a scene the three witches from Macbeth brewing a potion and staring into a crystal, which reveals another scene that takes place on a rocket ship. Originating from Earth, the men on the rocket ship are panicking because they have recently experienced nightmares, confusing illnesses, and unexpected death. They are destined for Mars, and they are worried that these events may be warnings from Martians not to arrive.
As the crewmembers talk, it becomes clear that the Earth they are leaving has banned many books, some of which are considered some of the best authors of all time. The rocket ship has the last edition of many of these works, and their goal is to burn the books upon their arrival at Mars. Once they have burned the books, there will be no remaining evidence that these authors ever existed...
The Exiles
THEIR EYES were fire and the breath flamed out the witches’ mouths as they bent to probe the caldron with greasy stick and bony finger.
‘When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?’
They danced drunkenly on the shore of an empty sea, fouling the air with their
three tongues, and burning it with their cats’ eyes malevolently aglitter:
‘Round about the cauldron go;
In the poison’d entrails throw.
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble!’
They paused and cast a glance about. ‘Where’s the crystal? Where the needles?’
‘Here!’
‘Good!’
‘Is the yellow wax thickened?’
‘Yes!’
‘Pour it in the iron mold!’
‘Is the wax figure done?’ They shaped it like molasses adrip on their green
hands.
‘Shove the needle through the heart!’
‘The crystal, the crystal; fetch it from the tarot bag. Dust it off; have a
look!’
They bent to the crystal, their faces white.
‘See, see, see . . .’
…
A rocket ship moved through space from the planet Earth to the planet Mars. On
the rocket ship men were dying.
The captain raised his head, tiredly. ‘We’ll have to use the morphine.’
‘But, Captain”
‘You see yourself this man’s condition.’ The captain lifted the wool blanket and
the man restrained beneath the wet sheet moved and groaned. The air was full of
sulphurous thunder.
‘I saw it’I saw it.’ The man opened his eyes and stared at the port where there
were only black spaces, reeling stars, Earth far removed, and the planet Mars
rising large and red. ‘I saw it’a bat, a huge thing, a bat with a man’s face,
spread over the front port. Fluttering and fluttering, fluttering and
fluttering.’
‘Pulse?’ asked the captain.
The orderly measured it. ‘One hundred and thirty.’
‘He can’t go on with that. Use the morphine. Come along, Smith.’
They moved away. Suddenly the floor plates were laced with bone and white skulls that screamed. The captain did not dare look down, and over the screaming he said, ‘Is this where Perse is?’ turning in at a hatch.
A white-smocked surgeon stepped away from a body. ‘I just don’t understand it.’
‘How did Perse die?’
‘We don’t know, Captain. It wasn’t his heart, his brain, or shock. He just’ died.’
The captain felt the doctor’s wrist, which changed to a hissing snake and bit
him. The captain did not flinch. ‘Take care of yourself. You’ve a pulse too.’
The doctor nodded. ‘Perse complained of pains’needles, he said’ in his wrists and
legs. Said he felt like wax, melting. He fell. I helped him up. He cried like a
child. Said he had a silver needle in his heart. He died. Here he is. We can
repeat the autopsy for you. Everything’s physically normal.’
‘That’s impossible! He died of something!’
The captain walked to a port. He smelled of menthol and iodine and green soap on his polished and manicured hands. His white teeth were dentifriced, and his ears scoured to a pinkness, as were his cheeks. His uniform was the color of new
salt, and his boots were black mirrors shining below him. His crisp crew-cut
hair smelled of sharp alcohol. Even his breath was sharp and new and clean.
There was no spot to him. He was a fresh instrument, honed and ready, still hot
from the surgeon’s oven.
The men with him were from the same mold. One expected huge brass keys spiraling
slowly from their backs. They were expensive, talented, well-oiled toys,
obedient and quick.
The captain watched the planet Mars grow very large in space. ‘We’ll be landing
in an hour on that damned place. Smith, did you see any bats, or have other
nightmares?’
‘Yes, sir. The month before our rocket took off from New York, sir. White rats
biting my neck, drinking my blood. I didn’t tell. I was afraid you wouldn’t let me come on this trip.’
‘Never mind,’ sighed the captain. ‘I had dreams too. In all of my fifty years I
never had a dream until that week before we took off from Earth. And then every night I dreamed I was a white wolf. Caught on a snowy hill. Shot with a silver bullet. Buried with a stake in my heart.’ He moved his head toward Mars. ‘Do you think, Smith, they know we’re coming?’
‘We don’t know if there are Martian people, sir.’
‘Don’t we? They began frightening us off eight weeks ago, before we started.
They’ve killed Perse and Reynolds now. Yesterday they made Crenville go blind.
How? I don’t know. Bats, needles, dreams, men dying for no reason. I’d call it
witchcraft in another day. But this is the year 2120, Smith. We’re rational men.
This all can’t be happening. But it is! Whoever they are, with their needles and
their bats, they’ll try to finish us all.’ He swung about. ‘Smith, fetch those books from my file. I want them when we land.’
Two hundred books were piled on the rocket deck.
‘Thank you, Smith. Have you glanced at them? Think I’m insane? Perhaps. It’s a
crazy hunch. At that last moment I ordered these books from the Historical
Museum. Because of my dreams. Twenty nights I was stabbed, butchered, a
screaming bat pinned to a surgical mat, a thing rotting underground in a black
box; bad, wicked dreams. Our whole crew dreamed of witch-things and were-things, vampires and phantoms, things they couldn’t know anything about. Why? Because books on such ghastly subjects were destroyed a century ago. By law. Forbidden for anyone to own the grisly volumes. These books you see here are the last copies, kept for historical purposes in the locked museum vaults.’
Smith bent to read the dusty titles:
‘Tales of Mystery and Imagination, by Edgar Allan Poe. Dracula, by Brain Stoker.
Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving. Rappaccini’s Daughter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, by Ambrose Bierce. Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. The Willows, by Algernon Blackwood. The Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum. The Weird Shadow Over Innsmouth, by H. P. Lovecraft. And more! Books by Walter de la Mare, Wakefield, Harvey, Wells, Asquith, Huxley’all forbidden authors. All burned in the same year that Halloween was outlawed and Christmas was banned! But, sir, what good are these to us on the rocket?’
‘I don’t know,’ sighed the captain, ‘yet.’
…
The three bags lifted the crystal where the captain’s image flickered, his tiny
voice tinkling out of the glass:
‘I don’t know,’ sighed the captain, ‘yet.’
The three witches glared redly into one another’s faces.
‘We haven’t much time,’ said one.
‘Better warn Them in the City.’
‘They’ll want to know about the books. It doesn’t look good. That fool of a
captain!’
‘In an hour they’ll land their rocket.’
The three bags shuddered and blinked up at the Emerald City by the edge of the
dry Martian sea.
…
In its highest window a small man held a blood-red drape aside.
He watched the wastelands where the three witches fed their caldron and shaped the waxes. Farther along, ten thousand other blue fires and laurel incenses, black tobacco smokes and fir weeds, cinnamons and bone dusts rose soft as moths through the Martian night. The man counted the angry, magical fires. Then, as the three witches stared, he turned. The crimson drape, released, fell, causing the distant portal to wink, like a yellow eye.
Mr. Edgar Allan Poe stood in the tower window, a faint vapor of spirits upon his
breath. ‘Hecate’s friends are busy tonight,’ he said, seeing the witches, far
below.
A voice behind him said, ‘I saw Will Shakespeare at the shore, earlier, whipping
them on. All along the sea Shakespeare’s army alone, tonight, numbers thousands: the three witches, Oberon, Hamlet’s father, Puck’all, all of them’thousands!
Good lord, a regular sea of people.’
‘Good William.’ Poe turned. He let the crimson drape fall shut. He stood for a
moment to observe the raw stone room, the black-timbered table, the candle
flame, the other man, Mr. Ambrose Bierce, sitting very idly there, lighting
matches and watching them burn down, whistling under his breath, now and then laughing to himself.
‘We’ll have to tell Mr. Dickens now,’ said Mr. Poe. ‘We’ve put it off too long.
It’s a matter of hours. Will you go down to his home with me, Bierce?’
Bierce glanced up merrily. ‘I’ve just been thinking’what’ll happen to us?’
‘If we can’t kill the rocket men off, frighten them away, then we’ll have to
leave, of course. We’ll go on to Jupiter, and when they come to Jupiter, we’ll
go on to Saturn, and when they come to Saturn, we’ll go to Uranus, or Neptune,
and then on out to Pluto”’
‘Where then?’
Mr. Poe’s face was weary; there were fire coals remaining, fading, in his eyes,
and a sad wildness in the way he talked, and a uselessness of his hands and the
way his hair fell lankly over his amazing white brow. He was like a satan of
some lost dark cause, a general arrived from a derelict invasion. His silky,
soft, black mustache was worn away by his musing lips. He was so small his brow
seemed to float, vast and phosphorescent, by itself, in the dark room.
‘We have the advantages of superior forms of travel,’ he said. ‘We can always
hope for one of their atomic wars, dissolution, the dark ages come again. The
return of superstition. We could go back then to Earth, all of us, in one
night.’ Mr. Poe’s black eyes brooded under his round and luminant brow. He gazed
at the ceiling. ‘So they’re coming to ruin this world too? They won’t leave
anything undefiled, will they?’
‘Does a wolf pack stop until it’s killed its prey and eaten the guts? It should
be quite a war. I shall sit on the side lines and be the scorekeeper. So many
Earthmen boiled in oil, so many Mss. Found in Bottles burnt, so many Earthmen
stabbed with needles, so many Red Deaths put to flight by a battery of
hypodermic syringes’ha!’
Poe swayed angrily, faintly drunk with wine. ‘What did we do? Be with us,
Bierce, in the name of God! Did we have a fair trial before a company of
literary critics? No! Our books were plucked up by neat, sterile, surgeon’s
pliers, and flung into vats, to boil, to be killed of all their mortuary germs.
Damn them all!’
‘I find our situation amusing,’ said Bierce.
They were interrupted by a hysterical shout from the tower stair.
‘Mr. Poe! Mr. Bierce!’
‘Yes, yes, we’re coming!’ Poe and Bierce descended to find a man gasping against
the stone passage wall.
‘Have you heard the news?’ he cried immediately, clawing at them like a man
about to fall over a cliff. ‘In an hour they’ll land! They’re bringing books
with them’old books, the witches said! What’re you doing in the tower at a time
like this? Why aren’t you acting?’
Poe said: ‘We’re doing everything we can, Blackwood. You’re new to all this.
Come along, we’re going to Mr. Charles Dickens’ place”’
”to contemplate our doom, our black doom,’ said Mr. Bierce, with a wink.
They moved down the echoing throats of the castle, level after dim green level,
down into mustiness and decay and spiders and dreamlike webbing. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Poe, his brow like a huge white lamp before them, descending, sinking. ‘All along the dead sea tonight I’ve called the others. Your friends and mine, Blackwood’Bierce. They’re all there. The animals and the old women and the tall men with the sharp white teeth. The traps are waiting; the pits, yes, and the pendulums. The Red Death.’ Here he laughed quietly. ‘Yes, even the Red Death. I never thought’no, I never thought the time would come when a thing like the Red Death would actually be. But they asked for it, and they shall have it!’
‘But are we strong enough?’ wondered Blackwood.
‘How strong is strong? They won’t be prepared for us, at least. They haven’t the
imagination. Those clean young rocket men with their antiseptic bloomers and
fish-bowl helmets, with their new religion. About their necks, on gold chains,
scalpels. Upon their heads, a diadem of microscopes. In their holy fingers,
steaming incense urns which in reality are only germicidal ovens for steaming
out superstition. The names of Poe, Bierce, Hawthorne, Blackwood’blasphemy to
their clean lips.’
Outside the castle they advanced through a watery space, a tarn that was not a
tarn, which misted before them like the stuff of nightmares. The air filled with
wing sounds and a whirring, a motion of winds and blacknesses. Voices changed,
figures swayed at campfires. Mr. Poe watched the needles knitting, knitting,
knitting, in the firelight; knitting pain and misery, knitting wickedness into
wax marionettes, clay puppets. The caldron smells of wild garlic and cayenne and saffron hissed up to fill the night with evil pungency.
‘Get on with it!’ said Poe. ‘I’ll be back!’
All down the empty seashore black figures spindled and waned, grew up and blew into black smoke on the sky. Bells rang in mountain towers and licorice ravens spilled out with the bronze sounds and spun away to ashes.
Over a lonely moor and into a small valley Poe and Bierce hurried, and found
themselves quite suddenly on a cobbled street, in cold, bleak, biting weather,
with people stomping up and down stony courtyards to warm their feet; foggy
withal, and candles flaring in the windows of offices and shops where hung the
Yuletide turkeys. At a distance some boys, all bundled up, snorting their pale
breaths on the wintry air, were trilling, ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,’ while
the immense tones of a great clock continuously sounded midnight. Children
dashed by from the baker’s with dinners all asteam in their grubby fists, on
trays and under silver bowls.
At a sign which read SCROOGE, MARLEY AND DICKENS, Poe gave the Marley-faced knocker a rap, and from within, as the door popped open a few inches, a sudden gust of music almost swept them into a dance. And there, beyond the shoulder of the man who was sticking a him goatee and mustaches at them, was Mr. Fezziwig clapping his hands, and Mrs. Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile, dancing and colliding with other merrymakers, while the fiddle chirped and laughter ran about a table like chandelier crystals given a sudden push of wind. The large table was heaped with brawn and turkey and holly and geese; with mince pies, suckling pigs, wreaths of sausages, oranges and apples; and there was Bob Cratchit and Little Dorrit and Tiny Tim and Mr. Fagin himself, and a man who looked as if he might be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato’who else but Mr. Marley, chains and all, while the wine poured and the brown turkeys did their excellent best to steam!
‘What do you want?’ demanded Mr. Charles Dickens.
‘We’ve come to plead with you again, Charles; we need your help,’ said Poe.
‘Help? Do you think I would help you fight against those good men coming in the
rocket? I don’t belong here, anyway. My books were burned by mistake. I’m no
supernaturalist, no writer of horrors and terrors like you, Poe; you, Bierce, or
the others. I’ll have nothing to do with you terrible people!’
‘You are a persuasive talker,’ reasoned Poe. ‘You could go to meet the rocket
men, lull them, lull their suspicions and then’then we would take care of them.’
Mr. Dickens eyed the folds of the black cape which hid Poe’s hands. From it,
smiling, Poe drew forth a black cat. ‘For one of our visitors.’
‘And for the others?’
Poe smiled again, well pleased. ‘The Premature Burial?’
‘You are a grim man, Mr. Poe.’
‘I am a frightened and an angry man. I am a god, Mr. Dickens, even as you are a
god, even as we all are gods, and our inventions’our people, if you wish’have
not only been threatened, but banished and burned, torn up and censored, ruined and done away with. The worlds we created are falling into ruin. Even gods must fight!’
‘So?’ Mr. Dickens tilted his head, impatient to return to the party, the music,
the food. ‘Perhaps you can explain why we are here? How did we come here?’
‘War begets war. Destruction begets destruction. On Earth, a century ago, in the
year 2020 they outlawed our books. Oh, what a horrible thing’to destroy our
literary creations that way! It summoned us out of’what? Death? The Beyond? I
don’t like abstract things. I don’t know. I only know that our worlds and our
creations called us and we tried to save them, and the only saving thing we
could do was wait out the century here on Mars, hoping Earth might overweight
itself with these scientists and their doubtings; but now they’re coming to
clean us out of here, us and our dark things, and all the alchemists, witches,
vampires, and were-things that, one by one, retreated across space as science
made inroads through every country on Earth and finally left no alternative at
all but exodus. You must help us. You have a good speaking manner. We need you.’
‘I repeat, I am not of you, I don’t approve of you and the others,’ cried
Dickens angrily. ‘I was no player with witches and vampires and midnight
things.’
‘What of A Christmas Carol?’
‘Ridiculous! One story. Oh, I wrote a few others about ghosts, perhaps, but what
of that? My basic works had none of that nonsense!’
‘Mistaken or not, they grouped you with us. They destroyed your books’your
worlds too. You must hate them, Mr. Dickens!’
‘I admit they are stupid and rude, but that is all. Good day!’
‘Let Mr. Marley come, at least!’
‘No!’
The door slammed. As Poe turned away, down the street, skimming over the frosty ground, the coachman playing a lively air on a bugle, came a great coach, out of which, cherry-red, laughing and singing, piled the Pickwickians, banging on the door, shouting Merry Christmas good and loud, when the door was opened by the fat boy.
Mr. Poe hurried along the midnight shore of the dry sea. By fires and smoke he
hesitated, to shout orders, to check the bubbling caldrons, the poisons and the
chalked pentagrams. ‘Good!’ he said, and ran on. ‘Fine!’ he shouted, and ran
again. People joined him and ran with him. Here were Mr. Coppard and Mr. Machen running with him now. And there were hating serpents and angry demons and fiery bronze dragons and spitting vipers and trembling witches like the barbs and nettles and thorns and all the vile flotsam and jetsam of the retreating sea of imagination, left on the melancholy shore, whining and frothing and spitting.
Mr. Machen stopped. He sat like a child on the cold sand. He began to sob. They
tried to soothe him, but he would not listen. ‘I just thought,’ he said. ‘What
happens to us on the day when the last copies of our books are destroyed?’
The air whirled.
‘Don’t speak of it!’
‘We must,’ wailed Mr. Machen. ‘Now, now, as the rocket comes down, you, Mr. Poe; you, Coppard; you, Bierce’all of you grow faint. Like wood smoke. Blowing away.
Your faces melt”
‘Death! Real death for all of us.’
‘We exist only through Earth’s sufferance. If a final edict tonight destroyed
our last few works we’d be like lights put out.’
Coppard brooded gently. ‘I wonder who I am. In what Earth mind tonight do I
exist? In some African hut? Some hermit, reading my tales? Is he the lonely
candle in the wind of time and science? The flickering orb sustaining me here in
rebellious exile? Is it him? Or some boy in a discarded attic, finding me, only
just in time! Oh, last night I felt ill, ill, ill to the marrows of me, for
there is a body of the soul as well as a body of the body, and this soul body
ached in all of its glowing parts, and last night I felt myself a candle,
guttering. When suddenly I sprang up, given new light! As some child, sneezing
with dust, in some yellow garret on Earth once more found a worn, time-specked
copy of me! And so I’m given a short respite!’
A door banged wide in a little hut by the shore. A thin short man, with flesh
hanging from him in folds, stepped out and, paying no attention to the others,
sat down and stared into his clenched fists.
‘There’s the one I’m sorry for,’ whispered Blackwood. ‘Look at him, dying away.
He was once more real than we, who were men. They took him, a skeleton thought,
and clothed him in centuries of pink flesh and snow beard and red velvet suit
and black boot; made him reindeers, tinsel, holly. And after centuries of
manufacturing him they drowned him in a vat of Lysol, you might say.’
The men were silent.
‘What must it be on Earth?’ wondered Poe. ‘Without Christmas? No hot chestnuts,
no tree, no ornaments or drums or candles’nothing; nothing but the snow and wind
and the lonely, factual people. . . .’
They all looked at the thin little old man with the scraggly beard and faded red
velvet suit.
‘Have you heard his story?’
‘I can imagine it. The glitter-eyed psychiatrist, the clever sociologist, the
resentful, froth-mouthed educationalist, the antiseptic parents”’
‘A regrettable situation,’ said fierce, smiling, ‘for the Yuletide merchants
who, toward the last there, as I recall, were beginning to put up holly and sing
Noel the day before Halloween. With any luck at all this year they might have
started on Labor Day!’
Bierce did not continue. He fell forward with a sigh. As he lay upon the ground
he had time to say only, ‘How interesting.’ And then, as they all watched,
horrified, his body burned into blue dust and charred bone, the ashes of which
fled through the air in black tatters.
‘Bierce, Berce!’
‘Gone!’
‘His last book gone. Someone on Earth just now burned it.’
‘God rest him. Nothing of him left now. For what are we but books, and when
those are gone, nothing’s to be seen.’
A rushing sound filled the sky.
They cried out, terrified, and looked up. In the sky, dazzling it with sizzling
fire clouds, was the rocket! Around the men on the seashore lanterns bobbed;
there was a squealing and a bubbling and an odor of cooked spells. Candle-eyed
pumpkins lifted into the cold clear air. Thin fingers clenched into fists and a
witch screamed from her withered mouth:
‘Ship, ship, break, fall!
Ship, ship, burn all!
Crack, flake, shake, melt!
Mummy dust, cat pelt!’
‘Time to go,’ murmured Blackwood. ‘On to Jupiter, on to Saturn or Pluto.’
‘Run away?’ shouted Poe in the wind. ‘Never!’
‘I’m a tired old man!’
Poe gazed into the old man’s face and believed him. He climbed atop a huge
boulder and faced the ten thousand gray shadows and green lights and yellow eyes
on the hissing wind.
‘The powders!’ he shouted.
A thick hot smell of bitter almond, civet, cumin, wormseed and orris!
The rocket came down’steadily down, with the shriek of a damned spirit! Poe
raged at it! He flung his fists up and the orchestra of heat and smell and
hatred answered in symphony! Like stripped tree fragments, bats flew upward!
Burning hearts, flung like missiles, burst in bloody fireworks on the singed
air. Down, down, relentlessly down, like a pendulum the rocket came. And Poe
howled, furiously, and shrank back with every sweep and sweep of the rocket
cutting and ravening the air! All the dead sea seemed a pit in which, trapped,
they waited the sinking of the dread machinery, the glistening ax; they were
people under the avalanche!
‘The snakes!’ screamed Poe.
And luminous serpentines of undulant green hurtled toward the rocket. But it
came down, a sweep, a fire, a motion, and it lay panting out exhaustions of red
plumage on the sand, a mile away.
‘At it!’ shrieked Poe. ‘The plan’s changed! Only one chance! Run! At it! At it!
Drown them with our bodies! Kill them!’
And as if he had commanded a violent sea to change its course, to suck itself
free from primeval beds, the whirls and savage gouts of fire spread and ran like
wind and rain and stark lightning over the sea sands, down empty river deltas,
shadowing and screaming, whistling and whining, sputtering and coalescing toward the rocket which, extinguished, lay like a clean metal torch in the farthest
hollow. As if a great charred caldron of sparkling lava had been overturned, the
boiling people and snapping animals churned down the dry fathoms.
‘Kill them!’ screamed Poe, running.
The rocket men leaped out of their ship, guns ready. They stalked about,
sniffing the air like hounds. They saw nothing. They relaxed.
The captain stepped forth last. He gave sharp commands. Wood was gathered,
kindled, and a fire leapt up in an instant. The captain beckoned his men into a
half circle about him.
‘A new world,’ he said, forcing himself to speak deliberately, though he glanced
nervously, now and again, over his shoulder at the empty sea. ‘The old world
left behind. A new start. What more symbolic than that we here dedicate
ourselves all the more firmly to science and progress.’ He nodded crisply to his
lieutenant. ‘The books.’
Firelight limned the faded gilt titles: The Willows, The Outsider, Behold, The
Dreamer, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Land of Oz, Pellucidar, The Land That Time
Forgot A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the monstrous names of Machen and Edgar
Allan Poe and Cabell and Dunsany and Blackwood and Lewis Carroll; the names, the
old names, the evil names.
‘A new world. With a gesture, we burn the last of the old.’ The captain ripped
pages from the books. Leaf by seared leaf, he fed them into the fire.
A scream!
Leaping back, the men stared beyond the firelight at the edges of the
encroaching and uninhabited sea.
Another scream! A high and wailing thing, like the death of a dragon and the
thrashing of a bronzed whale left gasping when the waters of a leviathan’s sea
drain down the shingles and evaporate.
It was the sound of air rushing in to fill a vacuum, where, a moment before,
there had been something!
…
The captain neatly disposed of the last book by putting it into the fire.
The air stopped quivering. Silence!
The rocket men leaned and listened. ‘Captain, did you hear it?’
‘No.’
‘Like a wave, sir. On the sea bottom! I thought I saw something. Over there. A
black wave. Big. Running at us.’
‘You were mistaken.’
‘There, sir!’
‘What?’
‘See it? There! The city! Way over! That green city near the lake! It’s
splitting in half. It’s falling!’
The men squinted and shuffled forward.
Smith stood trembling among them. He put his hand to his head as if to find a
thought there. ‘I remember. Yes, now I do. A long time back. When I was a child.
A book I read. A story. Oz, I think it was. Yes, Oz. The Emerald City of Oz . .
.’
‘Oz? Never heard of it.’
‘Yes, Oz, that’s what it was. I saw it just now, like in the story. I saw it
fall.’
‘Smith!’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Report for psychoanalysis tomorrow.’
‘Yes, sir!’ A brisk salute.
‘Be careful.’
…
The men tiptoed, guns alert, beyond the ship’s aseptic light to gaze at the long
sea and the low hills.
‘Why,’ whispered Smith, disappointed, ‘there’s no one here at all, is there? No
one here at all.’
The wind blew sand over his shoes, whining.
No
The End
A final MM note.
Our reality is one ruled by quantum physics. An within this reality is the idea that thoughts create and change our reality. So what happens when entire groups of people no longer have , or possess, certain thoughts? What will the resulting landscape look like?
Here's a nice short story to provide some brief moments of pleasure. I do hope that you enjoy it as much as I have. - MM
THE DRAGON
By Ray Bradbury
The night blew in the short grass on the moor; there was no other motion. It had been years since a single bird had flown by in the great blind shell of sky.
Long ago a few small stones had simulated life when they crumbled and fell into dust. Now only the night moved in the souls of the two men bent by their lonely fire in the wilderness; darkness pumped quietly in their veins and ticked silently in their temples and their wrists.
Firelight fled up and down their wild faces and welled in their eyes in orange tatters. They listened to each other’s faint, cool breathing and the lizard blink of their eyelids. At last, one man poked the fire with his sword.
“Don’t idiot; you’ll give us away!”
“No matter,” said the second man, “The dragon can smell us miles off anyway. God’s breath, it’s cold. I wish I was back at the castle.”
“It’s death, not sleep, we’re after…”
“Why? Why? The dragon never sets foot in the town!”
“Quiet, fool! He eats men traveling alone from our town to the next!”
“Let them be eaten and let us get home!”
“Wait now; listen!”
The two men froze.
They waited a long time, but there was only the shake of their horses’ nervous skin like black velvet tambourines jingling the silver stirrup buckles, softly, softly.
“Ah.” The second man sighed. “What a land of nightmares. Everything happens here. Someone blows out the sun; it’s night. And then, and then, oh, God, listen! This dragon, they say his eyes are fire. His breath a white gas; you can see him burn across the dark lands. He runs with sulfur and thunder and kindles the grass. Sheep panic and die insane. Women deliver forth monsters. The dragon’s fury is such that tower walls shake back to dust. His victims, at sunrise, are strewn hither thither on the hills. How many knights, I ask, have gone for this monster and failed, even as we shall fail?”
“Enough of that!”
“More than enough! Out here in this desolation I cannot tell what year this is!”
“Nine hundred years since the Nativity.”
“No, no,” whispered the second man, eyes shut, “On this moor is no Time, is only Forever. I feel if I ran back on the road the town would be gone, the people yet unborn, things changed, the castles unquarried from the rocks, the timbers still uncut from the forests; don’t ask how I know; the moor knows and tells me. And here we sit alone in the land of the fire dragon, God save us!”
“Be you afraid, then gird on your armor!”
“What use? The dragon runs from nowhere; we cannot guess its home. It vanishes in fog; we know not where it goes. Aye, on with our armor, we’ll die well dressed.”
Half into his silver corselet, the second man stopped again and turned his head.
Across the dim country, full of night and nothingness from the heart of the moor itself, the wind sprang full of dust from clocks that used dust for telling time. There were black suns burning in the heart of this new wind and a million burnt leaves shaken from some autumn tree be- yond the horizon. This wind melted landscapes, lengthened bones like white wax, made the blood roil and thicken to a muddy deposit in the brain. The wind was a thousand souls dying and all time confused and in transit. It was a fog inside of a mist inside of a darkness, and this place was no man’s place and there was no year or hour at all, but only these men in a faceless emptiness of sudden frost, storm and white thunder which
moved behind the great falling pane of green glass that was the lightning. A squall of rain drenched the turf; all faded away until there was unbreathing hush and the two men waiting alone with their warmth in a cool season.
“There,” whispered the first man. “Oh, there…”
Miles off, rushing with a great chant and a roar – the dragon.
In silence the men buckled on their armor and mounted their horses. The midnight wilderness was split by a monstrous gushing as the dragon roared nearer, nearer; its flashing yellow glare spurted above a hill and then, fold on fold of dark body, distantly seen, therefore indistinct, flowed over that hill and plunged vanishing into a valley.
“Quick!”
They spurred their horses forward to a small hollow.
“This is where it passes!”
They seized their lances with mailed fists and blinded their horses by flipping the visors down over their eyes.
“Lord!”
“Yes, let us use His name.”
On the instant, the dragon rounded a hill. Its monstrous amber eye fed on them, fired their armor in red glints and glitters, With a terrible wailing cry and a grinding rush it flung itself forward.
“Mercy, God!”
The lance struck under the unlidded yellow eye, buckled, tossed the man through the air. The dragon hit, spilled him over, down, ground him under. Passing, the black brunt of its shoulder smashed the remaining horse and rider a hundred feet against the side of a boulder, wailing, wailing, the dragon shrieking, the fire all about, around, under it, a pink, yellow, orange sun-fire with great soft plumes of blinding smoke.
…
“Did you see it?” cried a voice. “Just like I told you!”
“The same! The same! A knight in armor, by the Lord Harry! We hit him!”
“You goin’ to stop?”
“Did once; found nothing. Don’t like to stop on this moor. I get the willies. Got a feel, it has.”
“But we hit something!”
“Gave him plenty of whistle; chap wouldn’t budge!”
A steaming blast cut the mist aside.
“We’ll make Stokely on time. More coal, eh, Fred?”
Another whistle shook dew from the empty sky. The night train, in fire and fury, shot through a gully, up a rise, and vanished away over cold earth toward the north, leaving black smoke and steam to dissolve in the numbed air minutes after it had passed and gone forever.
Do you want more?
I have more stories much like this one in my Ray Bradbury Index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
Here is a nice story to get your mind off of whatever it might be on right now. Please relax, fix yourself a nice coffee, tea, or beer… get into your most comfortable chair, and relax.
MARS IS HEAVEN!
by Ray Bradbury
The ship came down from space. It came from the stars and the black velocities, and the shining movements, and the silent gulfs of space. It was a new ship; it had fire in its body and men in its metal cells, and it moved with a clean silence, fiery and warm. In it were seventeen men, including a captain.
The crowd at the Ohio field had shouted and waved their hands up into the sunlight, and the rocket bad bloomed out great flowers of beat and cobs and run away into space on the third voyage to Mars!
Now it was decelerating with metal efficiency in the upper Martian atmospheres. It was still a thing of beauty and strength. It had moved in the midnight waters of space like a pale sea leviathan; it had passed the ancient moon and thrown itself onward into one nothingness following another. The men within it had been battered,, thrown about, sickened, made well again, each in his turn. One man had died, but now the remaining sixteen, with their eyes clear in their heads and their faces pressed to the thick glass ports, watched Mars swing up under them.
“Mars! Mars! Good old Mars, here we are!” cried Navigator Lustig.
“Good old Mars!” said Samuel Hinkston, archaeologist.
“Well,” said Captain John Black.
The ship landed softly. on a lawn of green grass. Outside, upon the lawn, stood an iron deer. Further up the lawn, a tall brown Victorian house sat in the quiet sunlight, all covered with scrolls and rococo, its windows made of blue and pink and yellow and green colored glass. Upon the porch were hairy geraniums and an old swing which was hooked into the porch ceiling and which now swung back and forth, back and forth, in a little breeze.
At the top of the house was a cupola with diamond, leaded-glass windows, and a dunce-cap roof! Through the front window you could see an ancient piano with yellow keys and a piece of music titled Beautiful Ohio sitting on the music rest.
Around the rocket in four directions spread the little town, green and motionless in the Martian spring, There were white houses and red brick ones, and tall elm trees blowing in the wind, and tall maples and horse chestnuts. And church steeples with golden bells silent in them.
The men in the rocket looked out and saw this. Then they looked at one another and then they looked out again. They held on~ to each other’s elbows, suddenly unable to breathe, it seemed. Their faces grew pale and they blinked constantly, running from glass port to glass port of the ship.
“I’ll be damned,” whispered Lustig, rubbing his face with his numb fingers, his eyes wet. “Ill be thinned, damned, damned.’~
“It can~t be, it just can’t be,” said Samuel Hinkston.
“Lord,” said Captain John Black.
There was a call from the chemist. “Sir, the atmosphere is fine for
breathing, sir.” –
Black turned slowly. “Are you sure?’
“No doubt of it, sir.”
“Then we’ll go. out,” said Lustig.
“Lord, yes,” said Samuel Hinkston.
“Hold on,” said Captain John Black. “Just a moment, Nobody gave any orders.”
“But, sir-.-”
“Sir, nothing. How do we know what this is?”
“We know what it is, sir,” said the chemist. “It’s a small town with good air in it, sir.”
“And it’s a small town the like of Earth towns,” said Samuel Hinkston,
the archaeologist. “Incredible. it~ can’t be, but it is.”
Captain John Black looked at him, idly. “Do you think that the civilizations of two planets can progress at the same rate and evolve in the same way, Hinkston?”
“I wouldn’t have thought so, sir.”
Captain Black stood by the port. “Look out there. The geraniums. A specialized plant. That specific variety has only been known on Earth for fifty years. Think of the thousands of years of time it takes to evolve plants. Then tell me if it is logical that the Martians should have: one, leaded glass windows; two, cupolas; three, porch swings; four, an instrument that looks like, a . piano and probably is a piano; and, five, if you look closely, . if a Martian composer would have published a piece of music titled, strangely enough, Beautiful Ohio. All of which means that we have an Ohio River here on Marst”
“It is quite strange, sir.”
“Strange, hell, it’s absolutely impossible, and I suspect the whole bloody shooting setup. Something’s wrong here, and I’m not leaving the ship until I know what it is.”
“Oh, sir,” said Lustig.
“Dam it,” said Samuel Hinkston. “Sir, I want to investigate this at first hand. It may be that there are similar patterns of thought, movement, civilization on every planet in our system. We may be on the threshold of the great psychological and metaphysical discovery In our time, sir, don’t you think?”
“I’m willing to wait a moment,” said Captain. John Black. – “It may be, sir, that we are looking upon a phenomenon that, for the first time, would absolutely prove the existence of a God, sir.”
“There are many people who are of good faith without such proof, Mr. Hinkston.”
“I’m one myself, sir. But certainly a thing like this, out there,” said Hinkston, “could not occur without divine intervention, sir. It fills me with such terror and elation I’ don’t know whether to laugh or cry, sir.”
“Do neither,. then, until we know what we’re up against.”
“Up against, sir?” inquired Lustig. “I see that we’re up against nothing.
It’s a good quiet, green town, much like the one I was born in, and I like the looks of It.”
“When were you born, Lustig?” –
– “In- 1910, sfr.”
“That makes you fifty years old, now, doesn’t it?”
“This being 1960, yes, sir.”
– “And you, Hinkston?”
“1920, sir. In Illinois. And this looks swell to me, sir.”
“This couldn’t be Heaven,” said the captain, ironically. “Though, I must admit, it looks peaceful and cool, and pretty much like Green Bluff, where I was born, in 1915.”
lie looked at the chemist. “The air’s all right, is it?”
“Yes, sir.”
‘Well, then, tell you what we’ll do. Lustig, you and Ilinkston and I will fetch ourselves out to look this town over. The other 14 men will stay aboard ship. If’ anything untoward happens, lift ‘the Ship ‘and get the hell out, do you bear what I say, Craner?”
“Yes, sir. The hell out we’ll go, sir. Leaving you?”,
“A loss of three men’s better than a whole ship. If something bad happens get back to Earth and warn the next Rocket, that’s Lingle’s Rocket, I think, which will be completed and ready to take off some time around next Christmas, what he has to meet up with. If there’s something hostile about Mars we certainly want the next expedition to be well armed.”
“So are we, sir. We’ve got a regular arsenal with us.”
“Tell the ‘men to stand by the guns, then, as. Lustig and Hinkston and I go out,”
“Right, sir.”
“Come along, Lustig, Hinkston.”
The three men walked together, down through the levels of the ship.
It was a beautiful spring day. A robin sat on a blossoming apple tree and sang continuously. Showers of petal snow sifted down when the wind touched the apple tree, and the blossom smell drifted upon the air. Somewhere in the town, somebody was playing the piano and the music came and went, came and went, softly, drowsily. The song was Beautiful Dreamer. Somewhere else, a phonograph, scratchy and faded, was hissing out a record of Roamin’ In The Gloamin,’ sung by Harry Lapder.
The three men stood outside the ship. The port closed behind them. At every window, a face pressed, looking out. The large metal guns pointed this way and that, ready.
Now the phonograph record being played was:
–
“Oh give me a June night
The moonlight and you—”
Lustig began to tremble. Samuel Hinkston did likewise.
Hinkston’s voice was so feeble and uneven that the captain had to ask him to repeat what he had said. “I said, sir, that I think I have solved this, all of this, sir!”
“And what is the solution, Hinkston?”
The soft wind blew. The sky was serene and quiet and somewhere a stream of water ran through the cool caverns and tree-shadings of a ravine.
Somewhere a horse and wagon trotted and rolled by, bumping.
“Sir, it must be, it has to be, this is the only solution!
Rocket travel began to Mars in the years before the first’ World War, sir!” S
The captain stared at his archaeologist. “No!”
“But, yes, sir! You must admit, look at all of this! How else explain it, the houses, the lawns, the iron deer, the flowers, the pianos, the music!”
“Hinkston, Hinkston, oh,” and the captain put his hand to his face, shaking his head, his hand shaking no , his lips blue.
“Sir, listen to me.” Hinkston took his elbow persuasively and looked up into the captain’s face, pleading. “Say that there -were some people in the year 1905, perhaps, who hated wars and wanted to get away from Earth and they got together, some scientists, in secret, and built a rocket and came out here to Mars.”
“No, no, Hinkston.”
“Why not? The world was a different place in 1905, they could have kept
-it a secret much more easily.”
“But the work, Hinkston, the work of building a complex thing like a rocket, oh, no, no.” The captain looked at his shoes, looked -at his hands, looked at the houses, and then at Hinkston.
“And they caine up here, and haturally the houses they built were similar to Earth houses because they
brought the cultural -~architecture with them, and here it is!”
“And they’ve lived here all these years?” said the captain.
“In peace and quiet, sir, yes. Maybe they made a few trips, to bring enough people here for one small town, and then stopped, for fear of being discovered. That’s why the town seems so old-fashioned. I don’t see a thing,
myself, that is older than the year 1927, do you?”
“No, frankly, I don’t, Hinkston.”
“These are our people, sir. This is an American city; it’s definitely not
European!”
“That—that’s right, too, Hinkston.”
“Or maybe, just maybe, sir, rocket travel is older than we think. Perhaps it started in some part of the world hundreds of years ago, was discovered and kept secret by a small number of men, and they came to Mars, with only occasional visits to Earth over the centuries.”
“You make it sound almost reasonable.”
“it is, sir. It has to be. We have the proof here before us, all we have ‘to do now, is find some people and verify it!”
“You’re right- there, of course. We can’t just stand here and talk. Did’ you bring your gun?”
“Yes, but we won’t need it.”
“We’ll see about it. Come along, we’ll ring that doorbell and see if anyone is home.”
Their boots were deadened of all sound in the thick green grass. It smelled from a fresh mowing. In spite of himself, Captain John Black felt a great peace come over him. It had been thirty years since he had een in a small’ town, and the buzzing of spring bees on the air lulled and quieted him, and the fresh look of things was a balm to the soul.
Hollow echoes sounded from under the boards as they walked across the porch and stood before the screen door. Inside, they could see a bead curtain hung across the hall entry, and a crystal chandelier and a Maxfleld Parrish painting framed on one wall over a comfortable Morris, Chair. The house smelled old, and of the attic, and infinitely comfortable. You could hear the tinkle of ice rattling in a lemonade pitcher~ In a distant kitchen, because of the day, someone was preparing a soft, lemon drieL – –
Captain’ John Black rang the bell.
Footsteps, dainty and thin, came along the hail and a kind-faced lady of some forty years, dressed in the sort of dress you might expect in the year 1909, peered out at them.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“Beg your pardon,” said Captain Black, uncertainly.
“But we’re looking for, that is, could you help us, I mean.” He stopped. She looked out at him with dark wondering eyes.
“If you’re selling something,” she said, “I’m much too busy and I haven’t time.” She turned to go.
“No, wail,” he cried bewilderingly. “What town is this?”
She looked him up and down as if he were crazy.
“What do you mean, what town is it? How could you be in a town and not know what town it was?”
The captain looked as if he wanted to go sit under a shady apple tree. “I beg your pardon,” he said, “But we’re strangers here. We’re from Earth, and we want to know how this town got here and you’ got here.”
“Are you census takers?” she asked.
“No,” be said. –
“What do you want then?” she demanded.
“Well,” said the captain.
“Well?” she asked. -‘
“How long has this town been here?” he wondered.
“It was built in 1868,” she snapped at them. “Is this a game?”
“No, not a game,” cried the captain. “Oh, God,” – be said. “Look here.
We’re from Earth”
“From where?” she said.
‘Prom Earth!” he said. –
“Where’s that?” she said.
“From Earth,” he cried. ‘ –
“Out of the ground, do you mean?”
“No, from the planet Earth!” he almost shouted.
“Here,” she insisted, “come out on the porch and I’ll show you.” , –
“No,” she said, “I won’t come out there, you are all evidently quite mad
from the sun.”
Lustig and Hinkston stood behind the captain. Hinkston now spoke up.
“Mrs.,” he said. ‘We came in a flying ship across space, among the stars. We came from the third planet from the sun, Earth, to tb-is planet, which is Mars.
Now do you understand, Mrs.?”
“Mad from the sun,” she said, taking hold of the door. “Go away now, before I call my husband who’s upstairs taking a nap, and he’ll beat you all with his fists.”
“But—” said Hinkston. “This is Mars, is it not?”
“This,” explained the woman, as if she were addressing a child, “is Green Lake, Wisconsin, on the continent of America, surrounded by the Pacific and ~Atlantic Oceans, on a place called the world, or sometimes, the Earth. Go away now. Good-bye!”
She slammed the door. –
-The three men stood before the door with their hands up in the air toward it, as if pleading with her to open it once more.
They looked at one another.
– “Let’s knock the door down,” said Lustig.
“We can’t,” sighed the captain.
“Why not?”
“She didn’t do anything bad, did she? We’re the strangers here. This is private property. Good God, Hinkstonl” He went and sat down on the porchstep.
“What, sir?”
Did it ever strike you, that maybe we got ourselves, somehow, some way, fouled up. And, by accident, came back and landed on Earth!”
“Oh, sir, oh, sir, oh oh, sir.” And Hinkston sat down numbly and thought about it.
Lustig stood up in the sunlight. “How could we have done that?”
“I don’t know, just let me think.”
}Iinkston said, “But we checked every mile of the way, and we saw Mars and our chronometers said so many miles ‘gone, and we went past the moon and out into space and here we are, on Mars. I’m sure we’re on Mars, ‘ sir.” Lustig said, “But, suppose that, by accident, in space, in time, or something, we landed on a planet in space, in another time.
Suppose this is Earth, thirty or fifty years ago? Maybe we got lost in the dimensions, do you think?”
“Oh, go away, Lustig.” -‘
“Are the men in the ship keeping an eye on us, Hink..
ston?” , –
“At their guns, sir.”
Lustig went to the door, rang the bell. When the door opened again, he asked, ‘What year is this?’ –
“1926, of, course!” cried the woman, furiously, and slammed the door again. “Did you bear that?” Lustig ran back to them, wildly, “She said 1926! We – have gone back in time. This is Earth!”
Lustig sat down and the three men let the wonder and terror of the thought afflict them. Their hands stirred fitfully on their knees. The wind blew, nodding the locks of hair on their heads.
The captain stood up, brushing off his pants. “I never thought it would be like this. It scares the hell out of me. How ‘can a thing like this happen?”
“Will anybody in the whole town believe us?” wondered Hinkston.
“Are we playing around with something dangerous? Time, I mean. Shouldn’t we just take off and go home?”
“No. We’ll try another house.”
They walked three houses down to a little white cottage under an oak tree. “I like to be as logical as I can’ get,” said the captain, He nodded at the town. “How does this sound to you, Hinkston? Suppose, as you- said originally, that rocket travel occurred years ago. And when the Earth people had lived here a number of years they began to get homesick for Earth. First a mild neurosis about it, then a full-fledged psychosis. Then, threatened insanity. What would you do, as a psychiatrist, if fated with such a problem?”
– –
Hinkston thought. “Well, I think I’d re-arrange the civilization on Mars so it resembled Earth more and more each day. If there was any way of reproducing every plant, every road and every lake, and even an ocean, I would do so. Then I would, by some vast crowd hypnosis, theoretically anyway, convince veryone in a town this size that this really was Earth, not Mars at all.”
“Good enough, Hinkston. I think we’re on the right track now. That woman in that house back there, just’ minks she’s living on Earth. It protects ‘her sanity. She and all the others in this town are the patients of the greatest experiment in migration and hypnosis you will ever lay your eyes on in your life.” –
“That’s it, sir!” cried Lustig.
“Well,” the captain sighed. “Now we’re getting some- – where. I feel better. It all sounds a bit more logical now. This talk about time and going back and forth and traveling in time turns my stomach upside
down. But, this way—”- He actually smiled for the first time in a month. “Well. It looks as if we’ll be fairly welcome here.”
“Or, will we, sir?” said Lustig. “After all, like the Pilgrims, these people came here to escape Earth. Maybe they won’t be too happy to see us, sir Maybe they’ll try to drive us ~out or kill us?”
‘We have superior weapons if that should happen. Anyway, all we can do is try. This next house now. Up we go.”
But they had hardly crossed the lawn when Lustig stopped and looked off across the town, down the quiet, dreaming afternoon street. “Sir,” he said.
“What is it, Lustig?” asked the captain.
“Oh, sir, sir, what I see, what I do see now before me, oh, oh—” said Lustig, and he began to cry. His fingers came up, twisting and trembling, and his face was all wonder and joy and incredulity. He sounded as if any moment he might go quite insane with happiness. He looked down the street and he began to run, stumbling awkwardly, falling, picking himself up, and running on. “Oh, God, God, thank you, God! Thank you!”
– “Don’t let him get away!” The captain broke into a run.
Now Lustig was running at full speed, shouting. He turned into a yard half way down the little shady side street and leaped up upon the porch of a large green house with an iron rooster on the roof
He was beating upon the door, shouting and hollering and crying when Hinkston and the captain ran up and stood in the yard, The door opened. Lustig yanked the screen wide and in a high wail of discovery and happiness, cried out, “Grandma! Grandpa!” –
Two old people stood in the doorway, their faces light. lug up.
“Albert!” Their voices piped and they rushed out to embrace and pat him on the back and move around him, “Albert, oh, Albert, it’s been so many years! How you’ve grown, boy, how big you ate, boy, oh, lbert boy, how are you!”
“Grandma, Grandpa!” sobbed Albert Lustig. “Good to see you! You look fine, fine! Oh, fine.” He held them, turned them, kissed them, hugged them, cried on them, held them out again, blinked at the little old people.- The, sun was in the sky, the wind blew, the grass was green, the screen door stood
open.
“Come in, lad, come in, there’s lemonade for you,fresh, lots of- it!”
“Grandma, Grandpa, good to see you! I’ve got- friends down here!
Here!” Lustig turned and waved wildly at the captain and Hinkston, who, all during the adventure on the porch, had stood in’ the shade of a tree, holding onto each other. “Captain, captain, come up, come up, I want you to meet my grandfolks!”
“Howdy,” said the folks. “Any- friend of Albert’s is ours, too! Don’t stand there with your mouths open Come on!”
In the living room of the old house it was cool and a grandfather clock ticked high and long and bronzed in one corner. There were soft pillows on large couches and walls filled with books and a rug cut in a thick rose pattern and antimacassars pinned to furniture, and lemonade in the hand, sweating, and cool on the thirsty tongue. “Here’s to our health.” Grandma tipped her glass to her porcelain teeth. – –
“How long you been here, Grandma?” said Lustig.
“A good many years,” she said, tartly. “Ever since we died.”
“Ever since you what?” asked Captain John Black, putting his drink down. – –
“Oh, yes,” Lustig looked at his captain. “They’ve been dead thirty years.”
“And you sit there, calmly!” cried the captain.
“Tush,” said the old woman, and winked glitteringly – at John Black. “Who are we to question what happens?
Here we are. What’s life, anyways? Who does what for why and where? All we know is here we are, alive again, and no questions -asked. A second chance.”
She toddled over and held out her -thin wrist to Captain John Black.
“Feel” He felt.~ “Solid, ain’t I?” she ask~ed. He nodded.
“You hear my voice, don’t you?” she inquired. Yes, he did. “Well, then,” she said in triumph, “why go around questioning?”
“Well,” said the captain, “it’s simply that we never thought we’d find a
thing like this on Mars.”
“And now you’ve found it. I dare say there’s lots on every planet that’ll show you God’s infinite ways.”
is this Heaven?” asked Hinkston.
“Nonsense, no. It’s a world and we get a second chance. Nobody told us why. But then nobody told us why we were on Earth, either. That other Earth, I mean. The one you came from. How do we know there wasn’t another before that one?”
“A good question,” said the captain.
The captain stood up and slapped his hand on his leg in an off-hand fashion. “We’ve got to be going. It’s been nice. Thank you for the drinks.”
He stopped. He turned and looked toward the door, startled. ‘ –
Far away, in the sunlight, there was a sound of voices, a crowd, a shouting and a great hello.
“What’s that?” asked Hinkston.
“We’ll soon find out!” And Captain John Black was out the front door abruptly, jolting across the green lawn and into the street of the Martian town.
He stood looking at the ship. The ports were open and his crew were streaming out, waving their hands. A crowd of people had gathered and in and through and among these people the members of the crew were running, talking, laughing, shaking hands. People did little dances. People swarmed. The rocket lay – empty and abandoned.
A brass band exploded in the sunlight, flinging off a gay tune from upraised tubas and trumpets. There was a bang of drums and a shrill of fifes. Little girls with golden hair jumped up and down. Little boys shouted, “Hoorayl” And fat men passed around ten-cent cigars. The mayor of the town made a speech. Then, each member of the crew with a mother on one -arm, a father or sister on the other, was spirited off down the street, into little cottages or big mansions and doors slammed shut.
The wind rose in the clear spring sky and all was silent. The brass band had banged off around a corner leaving the rocket to shine and dazzle alone in the sunlight.
“Abandoned!” cried the captain. “Abandoned the ship, they did! I’ll have their skins; by God! They had orders!”
“Sir,” said Lustig. “Don’t be too -hard on them. Those were all old relatives and friends.”
“That’s no excuse!” – –
“Think how they felt, captain, seeing familiar faces outside the ship!” –
“I would have obeyed orders! I would have~!’ The captain’s mouth
remained open.
Striding along the sidewalk – under the Martian sun, tall, smiling, eyes blue, face tan, came a young man of some twenty-six years. –
“John!” the man cried, and broke into a run.
“What?” said Captain .John Black. He swayed. –
“John, you old beggar, you!”
The man ran up and gripped his hand and slapped him
on the back. –
“It’s you,” said John Black.
“Of course, who’d you think it was!” –
“Edward!” The captain appealed now to Lustig and Hinkston, holding the stranger’s hand. “This is my brother – Edward. Ed, meet my men, Lustig, Hinkston My brother!” – – –
They tugged at each other’s hands and arms and then finally embraced.
“Ed!” “John, you old bum, you!” “You!re locking fine, Ed, but, Ed, what .is this? You haven’t ,changed over the years. You died, I remember, when you were twenty-six, and 1 was nineteen, oh God,
so many years ago, and here you are, and, Lord, what goes on, what goes on?”
Edward Black gave him a brotherly knock on the chin.
“Mom’s waiting,” he said.
“Mom?”
“And Dad, too.”
– “And Dad?” The- captain almost fell to earth as if hit upon the chest with a mighty weapon. He walked stiffly and awkwardly, out of coordination. He stuttered and whispered and talked only one or two ords at a time.
“Mom alive? Dad? Where?”
“At the old house on Oak Knoll Avenue.” –
“The old house.” The captain stared in delighted amazement. “Did you hear that, Lustig, Hinkston?”
~‘I know it’s hard for you to believe.”
“But alive. Real.”
“Don’t I feel real?” The strong arm, the firm grip, the white smile. The light, curling hair.
Hinkaton was gone. He had seen his own house down the street and was running for it. Lustig was grinning.
“Now you understand, sir, what happened to everybody on the ship. They couldn’t help themselves.”
“Yes. Yes,” said the captain, eyes shut. “Yes.” He put out his hand.
“When I open my eyes, you’ll be gone.” He opened his eyes. “You’re still here.
God, Edward, you look fine!” – – –
“Come along, lunch is waiting for you. I told Mom.” Lustig said, “Sir, Ui
be with my grandfolks if you want me.” –
“What? Oh, fine, Lustig. Later, then.”
Edward grabbed his arm and marched him. “You need support.” –
“I do. My knees, all funny. My stomach, loose. God.”
“There’s the house. Remember it?” –
“Remember it? Hell! I bet I can beat you to the front porch!” –
They ran. The wind roared over Captain John Black’s ears. The earth roared -under his feet. He saw the golden figure of Edward Black pull ahead of him in the amazing dream of reality. He saw the house rush- forward, the door open, the screen swing back. “Beat you!” cried Edward, – bounding up the steps. “I’m an old man,” panted the captain, “and you’re still young. But, then, you always beat me, I remember!”
In the doorway, Mom, pink, and plump and bright. And behind her, pepper grey, Dad, with his pipe in his hand.
“Mom, Dad!”
He ran up -the steps like a child, to meet them.
It was a fine long afternoon. They finished lunch and they sat in the living room and he told them all about his rocket and his being captain and they nodded and smiled upon him and Mother was just the same, and Dad bit the end off a cigar and lighted it in his old fashion. Mom brought in some iced tea in the middle of the afternoon. Then, there was a big turkey dinner at night and time flowing oil. When the drumsticks were sucked clean and lay brittle upon the plates, the captain leaned back in his chair and exhaled his deep contentment. Dad poured him a small glass of dry sherry. It was seven thirty in the evening. Night was in all the trees and coloring the sky, and the lamps were halos of dim light in the gentle house. From all the other houses down the streets came sounds of music; pianos playing, laughter.
Mom put a record on the victrola and she and Captain John Black bad a – dance. She was wearing the same perfume he remembered from the summer when she and Dad had been killed in the train accident. She was very real in his arms as they danced lightly to the music. –
“I’ll wake in the morning,” said the captain. “And I’ll be in my rocket in space, and this will be gone.”
“No, no, don’t think that,” she cried, softly, pleadingly~ “We’re here.
Don’t question. God is good to- us. Let’s be happy.”
The record ended with a – hissing.
“You’re tired, son,” said Dad. He waved his pipe. “You and Ed go on
upstairs. Your old bedroom is waiting for you.” . – –
“The old one?”
“The brass bed and all,” laughed Edward.
“But I should report my men in.”
“Why?” Mother was logical
“Why? Well, I don’t know. No reason, I guess. No,. none at all. What’s the difference?” He shook his head.
“I’m not being very logical these days,” –
“Good night, son.” She kissed his cheek. “‘Night, Mom.”
“Sleep tight, son.” Dad shook his hand.
“Same to you, Pop.” – “It’s good to have you home.”
“It’s good to be home.”
He left the land of cigar smoke and perfume and books and gentle light and ascended the stairs, talking, talking with Edward. Edward pushed a door open and there was the yellow brass bed and the old semaphore banners from college days and a -very musty raccoon coat which he petted with strange, muted affection. “It’s too much,” he said faintly. “Like -being in a thunder- shower without an umbrella. Fm soaked to the skin with emotion. I’m numb. I’m tired.” –
“A night’s sleep between cool clean sheets for you, my bucko.” Edward slapped wide the snowy linens and flounced the pillows. Then he put up a window and let the night blooming jasmine float in. There was moonlight and the sound of distant dancing and whispering.
“So this is Mars,” said the captain undressing.
“So this is Mars.” Edward undressed in idle, leisurely moves, drawing his shirt off over his head, revealing golden shoulders and the good muscular neck. –
– The lights were out, they were into bed, side by side, as in the days, how many decades ago? The captain lolled and was nourished by the night wind pushing the lace curtains out upon the dark room air. Among the trees, upon a lawn, someone had cranked up a portable phonograph and now it was
playing softly, “I’ll be loving you, always,- with a love that’s true, always.”
The thought of Anna came to his mind. “Is Anna here?”
His brother, lying straight out in the moonlight from the window,waited and then said, “Yes. She’s out of town. But she’ll be here in the morning.” –
The captain shut his eyes. “I want to see Anna very much?’ –
The room was square and quiet except for their breathing. “Good night, Ed.”
A pause. “Good night, John.”
He lay peacefully, letting his thoughts float. For the — first time the stress of the day was -moved aside, all of the excitement was calmed. He could think logically now. It had all been emotion. The bands playing, the sight – of familiar faces, the sick pounding of your heart. But—
now… –
How? He thought. How was all this made? And why? For what purpose?
Out of the goodness of some kind God? Was God, then, really that fine and thoughtful of his children? -How and why and what for? –
He thought of the various theories advanced in the first heat of the afternoon by Hinkston and Lustig. He let all kinds of new theories drop in lazy pebbles down through his mind, as through a dark water, now, turning, throwing out dull flashes of white light. Mars. Earth. Mom. Dad Edward. Mars. Martians.
Who had – lived here a thousand years ago on Mars? Martians? Or had this always been like this? Martians. He repeated the word quietly, inwardly. –
He laughed out loud, – almost. He had the ridiculous theory, all of a sudden. It gave him a kind of chilled feeling. It was really nothing to think of, of course. Highly. improbable. Silly. Forget it. Ridiculous.
But, he thought, Just suppose. Just suppose now, that there were Martians living on Mars and they saw our ship coming and -saw us inside our ship and hated – us. Suppose, now, just for the hell of it, that they wanted to destroy us, as invaders, as unwanted ones, and – they wanted to do it in a very clever way, so that we would be taken- off guard. Well, what would the best weapon be that a Martian could use against Earthmen with atom weapons? –
The answer was interesting. Telepathy, hypnosis, memory and imagination. –
Suppose all these houses weren’t real at all, – this bed not real, but only figments of my own imagination, given substance by telepathy and hypnosis by the Martians.
Suppose these houses are really some other shape, a Martian shape, but, -by playing on my desires and wants, these Martians have made this seem like my old home town, my old house, to lull me out of my suspicions?
What better way to fool a man, by his own emotions.
And suppose those two people in the next room, asleep, are not my mother and- father at all. But two Martians, incredibly brilliant, with –the ability to keep me under this dreaming hypnosis all of the time?
And that brass band, today? What a clever plan it would be. First, fool Lustig, then fool Hinkston, then gather a crowd around -the rocket ship and wave. And- all the men in the ship, seeing mothers, aunts, uncles, sweethearts dead ten, twenty years ago, naturally, disregarding orders, would rush- out and abandon the ship. What more natural?- What more unsuspecting? What more simple? A man doesn’t ask too many questions when his mother is suddenly brought back to life; he’s much too happy. And – the brass band played and everybody was taken off to private homes. And here we all are, tonight, in various houses, in various beds, with no weapons to protect us, and the rocket lies in the moonlight, empty. And wouldn’t it be horrible and terrifying to discover that all of this was part of some -great clever plan by the Martians to divide and conquer us, and kill us. Some time during the night, perhaps, my brother here on this bed, wifi change form, melt, shift, and become a one eyed, green and yellow-toothed Martian. It would be very simple for him just – to -turn over in bed and put a- knife into my heart. And in all those other houses down the street a dozen other brothers or fathers suddenly melting away and taking out knives and doing things to the unsuspecting, sleeping men of Earth. –
His hands were shaking under the covers. His body was cold, -Suddenly it was not a theory. Suddenly he was very afraid. He lifted- himself in bed and listened. The night was very quiet. The music had stopped. The wind had died.
His brother (?) lay sleeping beside him.
Very carefully he lifted the sheets, rolled them back. He slipped from bed and was walking softly across the room when his brother’s voice said, “Where are you going?”
“What?” –
His brother’s voice was quite cold. “I said, where do you think you’re going?”
“For a drink of water.”
“But you’re not thirsty.”
“Yes, yes, I am.” –
“No, you’re not.” –
Captain John Black broke and ran across the room.
He screamed. He screamed twice. – He never reached- the door.
…
In the morning, the brass band played a mournful dirge. From every house in the street came little solemn processions bearing long boxes and along the sun-filled street, weeping and changing, came the grandmas and grandfathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, walking -to the churchyard, where there were open holes – dug freshly and new- tombstones installed. Seventeen – holes in all, and seventeen tombstones. Three of the tombstones said, CAPTAIN JOHN BLACK, ALBERT LUSTIG, and SAMUEL HINKSTON. – – –
The mayor made a little sad speech, his face sometimes looking like the
mayor, sometimes looking like something else. — – – –
Mother and Father Black were there, with Brother Edward, and they ‘cried, their faces melting now – from a familiar face into something else. – –
Grandpa and Grandma Lustig were there, weeping~ their faces. Also shifting- like wax, – shivering as a- thing does in waves of heat on a summer day. – –
The coffins were lowered. Somebody murmured –about “the unexpected and sudden deaths of seventeen fine men during the night—”. – – – –
Earth was shoveled in on the coffin tops. –
After the funeral the brass band slammed and banged into town and the crowd stood around and waved and shouted as the rocket was torn to pieces and strewn about and blown up. – –
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Here’s a nice charming story. I guess it is a bit dated, but the hopefulness of the 1960’s shines through. Lovely.
THE END OF THE BEGINNING
Ray Bradbury
He stopped the lawn mower in the middie of the yard, because he felt that the
sun at just that moment had gone down and the stars come out. The fresh-cut
grass that had showered his face and body died soft!y away. Yes, the stars were
there, faint at first, but brightening in the clear desert sky. He heard the
porch screen door tap shut and felt his wife watching him as he watched the
night.
“Almost time,” she said.
He nodded; he did not have to check his watch. In the passing moments he felt
very old, then very young, very cold, then very warm, now this, now that.
Suddenly he was miles away. He was his own son talking steadily, moving briskly
to cover his pounding heart and the resurgent panics as he felt himself slip
into fresh uniform, check food supplies, oxygen flasks, pressure helmet,
space-suiting, and turn as every man on earth tonight turned, to gaze at the
swiftly filling sky.
Then, quickly, he was back, once more the father of the son, hands gripped to
the lawn-mower handle. His wife called, “Come sit on the porch.”
“I’ve got to keep busy!”
She came down the steps and across the lawn. “Don’t worry about Robert; he’ll be
all right.”
“But it’s all so new,” he heard himself say. “It’s never been done before. Think
of it – a manned rocket going up tonight to build the first space station. Good
lord, it can’t be done, it doesn’t exist, there’s no rocket, no proving ground,
no take-off time, no technicians. For that matter, I don’t even have a son named
Bob. The whole thing’s too much for me!”
“Then what are you doing out here, staring?”
He shook his head. “Well, late this morning, walking to the office, I heard
someone laugh out loud. It shocked me, so I froze in the middle of the street.
It was me, laughing! Why? Because finally I really knew what Bob was going to do tonight; at last I believed it. Holy is a word I never use, but that’s how I
felt stranded in all that traffic. Then, middle of the afternoon I caught myself
humming. You know the song. ‘A wheel in a wheel. Way in the middle of the air.’
I laughed again. The space station, of course, I thought. The big wheel with
hollow spokes where Bob’ll live six or eight months, then get along to the moon.
Walking home, I remembered more of the song. ‘Little wheel run by faith, Big
wheel run by the grace of God.’ I wanted to jump, yell, and flame-out myself!”
His wife touched his arm. “If we stay out here, let’s at least be comfortable.”
They placed two wicker rockers in the center of the lawn and sat quietly as the
stars dissolved out of darkness in pale crushings of rock salt strewn from
horizon to horizon.
“Why,” said his wife, at last, “it’s like waiting for the fireworks at Sisley
Field every year.”
“Bigger crowd tonight . . .”
“I keep thinking – a billion people watching the sky right now, their mouths all
open at the same time.”
They waited, feeling the earth move under their chairs.
“What time is it now?”
“Eleven minutes to eight.”
“You’re always right; there must be a clock in your head.”
“I can’t be wrong tonight. I’ll be able to tell you one second before they blast
off. Look! The ten-minute warning!”
On the western sky they saw four crimson flares open out, float shimmering down the wind above the desert, then sink silently to the extinguishing earth.
In the new darkness the husband and wife did not rock in their chairs.
After a while he said, “Eight minutes.” A pause. “Seven minutes.” What seemed a
much longer pause. “Six . . .”
His wife, her head back, studied the stars immediately above her and murmured,
“Why?” She closed her eyes. “Why the rockets, why tonight? Why all this? I’d
like to know.”
He examined her face, pale in the vast powdering light of the Milky Way. He felt
the stirring of an answer, but let his wife continue.
“I mean it’s not that old thing again, is it, when people asked why men climbed
Mt. Everest and they said, ‘Because it’s there’? I never understood. That was no
answer to me.”
Five minutes, he thought. Time ticking . . . his wrist watch . . . a wheel in a
wheel . . . little wheel run by . . . big wheel run by . . . way in the middle
of . . . four minutes! . . . The men snug in the rocket by now, the hive, the
control board flickering with light.
His lips moved.
“All I know is it’s really the end of the beginning. The Stone Age, Bronze Age,
Iron Age; from now on we’ll lump all those together under one big name for when we walked on Earth and heard the birds at morning and cried with envy. Maybe we’ll call it the Earth Age, or maybe the Age of Gravity. Millions of years we fought gravity. When we were amoebas and fish we struggled to get out of the sea without gravity crushing us. Once safe on the shore we fought to stand upright without gravity breaking our new invention, the spine, tried to walk without stumbling, run without falling. A billion years Gravity kept us home, mocked us with wind and clouds, cabbage moths and locusts. That’s what’s so god-awful big about tonight . . . it’s the end of old man Gravity and the age we’ll remember him by, for once and all. I don’t know where they’ll divide the ages, at the Persians, who dreamt of flying carpets, or the Chinese, who all unknowing
celebrated birthdays and New Years with strung ladyfingers and high skyrockets,
or some minute, some incredible second the next hour. But we’re in at the end of
a billion years trying, the end of something long and to us humans, anyway,
honorable.”
Three minutes . . . two minutes fifty-nine seconds . . . two minutes fifty-eight
seconds . . .
“But,” said his wife, “I still don’t know why.”
Two minutes, he thought. Ready? Ready? Ready? The far radio voice calling.
Ready! Ready! Ready! The quick, faint replies from the humming rocket. Check!
Check! Check!
Tonight, he thought, even if we fail with this first, we’ll send a second and a
third ship and move on out to all the planets and later, all the stars. We’ll
just keep going until the big words like immortal and forever take on meaning.
Big words, yes, that’s what we want. Continuity. Since our tongues first moved
in our mouths we’ve asked, What does it all mean? No other question made sense, with death breathing down our necks. But just let us settle in on ten thousand worlds spinning around ten thousand alien suns and the question will fade away. Man will be endless and infinite, even as space is endless and infinite. Man will go on, as space goes on, forever. Individuals will die as always, but our
history will reach as far as we’ll ever need to see into the future, and with
the knowledge of our survival for all time to come, we’ll know security and thus
the answer we’ve always searched for. Gifted with life, the least we can do is
preserve and pass on the gift to infinity. That’s a goal worth shooting for.
The wicker chairs whispered ever so softly on the grass.
One minute.
“One minute,” he said aloud.
“Oh!” His wife moved suddenly to seize his hands. “I hope that Bob . . .”
“He’ll be all right!”
“Oh, God, take care . . .”
Thirty seconds.
“Watch now.”
Fifteen, ten, five . . .
“Watch!”
Four, three, two, one.
“There! There! Oh, there, there!”
They both cried out. They both stood. The chairs toppled back, fell flat on the
lawn. The man and his wife swayed, their hands struggled to find each other,
grip, hold. They saw the brightening color in the sky and, ten seconds later,
the great uprising comet burn the air, put out the stars, and rush away in fire
flight to become another star in the returning profusion of the Milky Way. The
man and wife held each other as if they had stumbled on the rim of an incredible
cliff that faced an abyss so deep and dark there seemed no end to it. Staring
up, they heard themselves sobbing and crying. Only after a long time were they
able to speak.
“It got away, it did, didn’t it?”
“Yes . . .”
“It’s all right, isn’t it?”
“Yes . . . yes . . .”
“It didn’t fall back . . .?”
“No, no, it’s all right, Bob’s all right, it’s all right.”
They stood away from each other at last.
He touched his face with his hand and looked at his wet fingers. “I’ll be
damned,” he said, “I’ll be damned.”
They waited another five and then ten minutes until the darkness in their heads,
the retina, ached with a million specks of fiery salt. Then they had to close
their eyes.
“Well,” she said, “now let’s go in.”
He could not move. Only his hand reached a long way out by itself to find the
lawn-mower handle. He saw what his hand had done and said, “There’s just a
little more to do . . .”
“But you can’t see.”
“Well enough,” he said. “I must finish this. Then we’ll sit on the porch awhile
before we turn in.”
He helped her put the chairs on the porch and sat her down and then walked back out to put his hands on the guide bar of the lawn mower. The lawn mower. A wheel in a wheel. A simple machine which you held in your bands, which you sent on ahead with a rush and a clatter while you walked behind with your quiet
philosophy. Racket, followed by warm silence. Whirling wheel, then soft footfall
of thought.
I’m a billion years old, he told himself; I’m one minute old. I’m one inch, no,
ten thousand miles, tall. I look down and can’t see my feet they’re so far off
and gone away below.
He moved the lawn mower. The grass showering up fell softly around him; he
relished and savored it and felt that he was all mankind bathing at last in the
fresh waters of the fountain of youth.
Thus bathed, he remembered the song again about the wheels and the faith and the grace of God being way up there in the middle of the sky where that single star, among a million motionless stars, dared to move and keep on moving.
Then he finished cutting the grass.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
The main theme in this story is the role of faith in gaining redemption.
The Man is what the Judeo-Christian faiths would term the Messiah or Savior, but Bradbury opts to make this a broader, explicitly stating that this figure exists in many cultures and goes by many names.
What the Man brings, however, is a sense of peace and happiness that is akin to what the Judeo-Christian faiths would call redemption - that is, a forgiveness of sins and a more enlightened way of life.
The Man
By Ray Bradbury
CAPTAIN HART stood in the door of the rocket. ‘Why don’t they come?’ he said.
‘Who knows?’ said Martin, his lieutenant. ‘Do I know, Captain?’
‘What kind of a place is this, anyway?’ The captain lighted a cigar. He tossed
the match out into the glittering meadow. The grass started to burn.
Martin moved to stamp it out with his boot.
‘No,’ ordered Captain Hart, ‘let it burn. Maybe they’ll come see what’s
happening then, the ignorant fools.’
Martin shrugged and withdrew his foot from the spreading fire.
Captain Hart examined his watch. ‘An hour ago we landed here, and does the
welcoming committee rush out with a brass band to shake our hands? No indeed!
Here we ride millions of miles through space and the fine citizens of some silly
town on some unknown planet ignore us!’ He snorted, tapping his watch. ‘Well,
I’ll just give them five more minutes, and then”’
‘And then what?’ asked Martin, ever so politely, watching the captain’s jowls
shake.
‘We’ll fly over their damned city again and scare hell out of them.’ His voice
grew quieter. ‘Do you think, Martin, maybe they didn’t see us land?’
‘They saw us. They looked up as we flew over.
‘Then why aren’t they running across the field? Are they hiding? Are they
yellow?’
Martin shook his head. ‘No. Take these binoculars, sir. See for yourself.
Everybody’s walking around. They’re not frightened. They’well, they just don’t
seem to care.
Captain Hart placed the binoculars to his tired eyes. Martin looked up and had
time to observe the lines and the grooves of irritation, tiredness, nervousness
there. Hart looked a million years old; he never slept, he ate little, and drove
himself on, on. Now his mouth moved, aged and drear, but sharp, under the held
binoculars.
‘Really, Martin, I don’t know why we bother. We build rockets, we go to all the
trouble of crossing space, searching for them, and this is what we get. Neglect.
Look at those idiots wander about in there. Don’t they realize how big this is?
The first space flight to touch their provincial land. How many times does that
happen? Are they that blas’?’
Martin didn’t know.
Captain Hart gave him back the binoculars wearily. ‘Why do we do it, Martin?
This space travel, I mean. Always on the go. Always searching. Our insides
always tight, never any rest.’
‘Maybe we’re looking for peace and quiet. Certainly there’s none on Earth,’ said
Martin.
‘No, there’s not, is there?’ Captain Hart was thoughtful, the fire damped down.
‘Not since Darwin, eh? Not since everything went by the board, everything we
used to believe in, eh? Divine power and all that. And so you think maybe that’s
why we’re going out to the stars, eh, Martin? Looking for our lost souls, is
that it? Trying to get away from our evil planet to a good one?’
‘Perhaps, sir. Certainly we’re looking for something.’
Captain Hart cleared his throat and tightened back into sharpness. ‘Well, right
now we’re looking for the mayor of that city there. Run in, tell them who we
are, the first rocket expedition to Planet Forty-three in Star System Three.
Captain Hart sends his salutations and desires to meet the mayor. On the
double!’
‘Yes, sir.’ Martin walked slowly across the meadow.
‘Hurry!’ snapped the captain.
‘Yes, sir!’ Martin trotted away. Then he walked again, smiling to himself.
The captain had smoked two cigars before Martin returned. Martin stopped and
looked up into the door of the rocket, swaying, seemingly unable to focus his
eyes or think.
‘Well?’ snapped Hart. ‘What happened? Are they coming to welcome us?’
‘No.’ Martin had to lean dizzily against the ship.
‘Why not?’
‘It’s not important,’ said Martin. ‘Give me a cigarette, please, Captain.’ His
fingers groped blindly at the rising pack, for he was looking at the golden city
and blinking. He lighted one and smoked quietly for a long time.
‘Say something!’ cried the captain. ‘Aren’t they interested in our rocket?’
Martin said, ‘What? Oh. The rocket?’ He inspected his cigarette. ‘No, they’re
not interested. Seems we came at an inopportune time.’
‘Inopportune time!’
Martin was patient. ‘Captain, listen. Something big happened yesterday in that
city. It’s so big, so important that we’re second-rate’second fiddle. I’ve got
to sit down.’ He lost his balance and sat heavily, gasping for air.
The captain chewed his cigar angrily. “What happened?’ Martin lifted his head,
smoke from the burning cigarette in his fingers, blowing in the wind. ‘Sir,
yesterday, in that city, a remarkable man appeared’good, intelligent,
compassionate, and infinitely wise!’
The captain glared at his lieutenant. ‘What’s that to do with us?’
‘It’s hard to explain. But he was a man for whom they’d waited a long time’a
million years maybe. And yesterday he walked into their city. That’s why today,
sir, our rocket landing means nothing.’
The captain sat down violently. ‘Who was it? Not Ashley? He didn’t arrive in his
rocket before us and steal my glory, did he?’ He seized Martin’s arm. His face
was pale and dismayed.
‘Not Ashley, sir.’
‘Then it was Burton! I knew it. Burton stole in ahead of us and ruined my
landing! You can’t trust anyone any more.’
‘Not Burton, either, sir,’ said Martin quietly.
The captain was incredulous. ‘There were only three rockets. We were in the
lead. This man who got here ahead of us? What was his name!’
‘He didn’t have a name. He doesn’t need one. It would be different on every
planet, sir.’
The captain stared at his lieutenant with hard, cynical eyes. ‘Well, what did he
do that was so wonderful that nobody even looks at our ship?’
‘For one thing,’ said Martin steadily, ‘he healed the sick and comforted the
poor. He fought hypocrisy and dirty politics and sat among the people, talking,
through the day.’
‘Is that so wonderful?’
‘Yes, Captain.’
‘I don’t get this.’ The captain confronted Martin, peered into his face and
eyes. ‘You been drinking, eh?’ He was suspicious. He backed away. ‘I don’t
understand.’
Martin looked at the city. ‘Captain, if you don’t understand, there’s no way of
telling you.’
The captain followed his gaze. The city was quiet and beautiful and a great
peace lay over it. The captain stepped forward, taking his cigar from his lips.
He squinted first at Martin, then at the golden spires of the buildings.
‘You don’t mean’you can’t mean’ That man you’re talking about couldn’t be”’
Martin nodded. ‘That’s what I mean, sir.
The captain stood silently, not moving. He drew himself up.
‘I don’t believe it,’ he said at last.
At high noon Captain Hart walked briskly into the city, accompanied by
Lieutenant Martin and an assistant who was carrying some electrical equipment.
Every once in a while the captain laughed loudly, put his hands on his hips and
shook his head.
The mayor of the town confronted him. Martin set up a tripod, screwed a box onto
it, and switched on the batteries.
‘Are you the mayor?’ The captain jabbed a finger out.
‘I am,’ said the mayor.
The delicate apparatus stood between them, controlled and adjusted by Martin and
the assistant. Instantaneous translations from any language were made by the
box. The words sounded crisply on the mild air of the city.
‘About this occurrence yesterday,’ said the captain. ‘It occurred?’
‘It did.’
‘You have witnesses?’
‘We have.’
‘May we talk to them?’
‘Talk to any of us,’ said the mayor. ‘We are all witnesses.’
In an aside to Martin the captain said, ‘Mass hallucination.’ To the mayor,
‘What did this man’this stranger’look like?’
‘That would be hard to say,’ said the mayor, smiling a little.
‘Why would it?’
‘Opinions might differ slightly.’
‘I’d like your opinion, sir, anyway,’ said the captain. ‘Record this,’ he
snapped to Martin over his shoulder. The lieutenant pressed the button of a hand
recorder.
‘Well,’ said the mayor of the city, ‘he was a very gentle and kind man. He was
of a great and knowing intelligence.’
‘Yes’yes, I know, I know.’ The captain waved his fingers. ‘Generalizations. I
want something specific. What did he look like?’
‘I don’t believe that is important,’ replied the mayor.
‘It’s very important,’ said the captain sternly. ‘I want a description of this
fellow. If I can’t get it from you, I’ll get it from others.’ To Martin, ‘I’m
sure it must have been Burton, pulling one of his practical jokes.’
Martin would not look him in the face. Martin was coldly silent.
The captain snapped his fingers. ‘There was something or other’a healing?’
‘Many healings,’ said the mayor.
‘May I see one?’
‘You may,’ said the mayor. ‘My son.’ He nodded at a small boy who stepped
forward. ‘He was afflicted with a withered arm. Now, look upon it.’
At this the captain laughed tolerantly. ‘Yes, yes. This isn’t even
circumstantial evidence, you know. I didn’t see the boy’s withered arm. I see
only his arm whole and well. That’s no proof. What proof have you that the boy’s
arm was withered yesterday and today is well?’
‘My word is my proof,’ said the mayor simply.
‘My dear man!’ cried the captain. ‘You don’t expect me to go on hearsay, do you?
Oh no!’
‘I’m sorry,’ said the mayor, looking upon the captain with what appeared to be
curiosity and pity.
‘Do you have any pictures of the boy before today?’ asked the captain.
After a moment a large oil portrait was carried forth, showing the son with a
withered arm.
‘My dear fellow!’ The captain waved it away. ‘Anybody can paint a picture.
Paintings lie. I want a photograph of the boy.’
There was no photograph. Photography was not a known art in their society.
‘Well,’ sighed the captain, face twitching, ‘let me talk to a few other
citizens. We’re getting nowhere.’ He pointed at a woman. ‘You.’ She hesitated.
‘Yes, you; come here,’ ordered the captain. ‘Tell me about this wonderful man
you saw yesterday.’
The woman looked steadily at the captain. ‘He walked among us and was very fine
and good.’
‘What color were his eyes?’
‘The color of the sun, the color of the sea, the color of a flower, the color of
the mountains, the color of the night.’
‘That’ll do.’ The captain threw up his hands. ‘See, Martin? Absolutely nothing.
Some charlatan wanders through whispering sweet nothings in their ears and”’
‘Please, stop it,’ said Martin.
The captain stepped back. ‘What?’
‘You heard what I said,’ said Martin. ‘I like these people. I believe what they
say. You’re entitled to your opinion, but keep it to yourself, sir.’
‘You can’t talk to me this way,’ shouted the captain.
‘I’ve had enough of your highhandedness,’ replied Martin. ‘Leave these people
alone. They’ve got something good and decent, and you come and foul up the nest
and sneer at it. Well, I’ve talked to them too. I’ve gone through the city and
seen their faces, and they’ve got something you’ll never have’a little simple
faith, and they’ll move mountains with it. You, you’re boiled because someone
stole your act, got here ahead and made you unimportant!’
‘I’ll give you five seconds to finish,’ remarked the captain. ‘I understand.
You’ve been under a strain, Martin. Months of traveling in space, nostalgia,
loneliness. And now, with this thing happening, I sympathize, Martin. I overlook
your petty insubordination.’
‘I don’t overlook your petty tyranny,’ replied Martin. ‘I’m stepping out. I’m
staying here.’
‘You can’t do that!’
‘Can’t I? Try and stop me. This is what I came looking for. I didn’t know it,
but this is it. This is for me. Take your filth somewhere else and foul up other
nests with your doubt and your’scientific method!’ He looked swiftly about.
‘These people have had an experience, and you can’t seem to get it through your
head that it’s really happened and we were lucky enough to almost arrive in time
to be in on it.
‘People on Earth have talked about this man for twenty centuries after he walked
through the old world. We’ve all wanted to see him and hear him, and never had
the chance. And now, today, we just missed seeing him by a few hours.’
Captain Hart looked at Martin’s cheeks. ‘You’re crying like a baby. Stop it.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘Well, I do. In front of these natives we’re to keep up a front. You’re
overwrought. As I said, I forgive you.’
‘I don’t want your forgiveness.”
‘You idiot. Can’t you see this is one of Burton’s tricks, to fool these people,
to bilk them, to establish his oil and mineral concerns under a religious guise!
You fool, Martin. You absolute fool! You should know Earthmen by now. They’ll do
anything’blaspheme, lie, cheat, steal, kill, to get their ends. Anything is fine
if it works; the true pragmatist, that’s Burton. You know him!’
The captain scoffed heavily. ‘Come off it, Martin, admit it; this is the sort of
scaly thing Burton might carry off, polish up these citizens and pluck them when
they’re ripe.’
‘No,’ said Martin, thinking of it.
The captain put his hand up. ‘That’s Burton. That’s him. That’s his dirt, that’s
his criminal way. I have to admire the old dragon. Flaming in here in a blaze
and a halo and a soft word and a loving touch, with a medicated salve here and a
healing ray there. That’s Burton all right!’
‘No.’ Martin’s voice was dazed. He covered his eyes. ‘No, I won’t believe it.’
‘You don’t want to believe.’ Captain Hart kept at it. ‘Admit it now. Admit it!
It’s just the thing Burton would do. Stop daydreaming, Martin. Wake up! It’s
morning. This is a real world and we’re real, dirty people’Burton the dirtiest
of us all!’
Martin turned away.
‘There, there, Martin,’ said Hart, mechanically patting the man’s back. ‘I
understand. Quite a shock for you. I know. A rotten shame, and all that. That
Burton is a rascal. You go take it easy. Let me handle this.’
Martin walked off slowly toward the rocket.
Captain Hart watched him go. Then, taking a deep breath, he turned to the woman
he had been questioning. ‘Well. Tell me some more about this man. As you were
saying, madam?’
Later the officers of the rocket ship ate supper on card tables outside. The
captain correlated his data to a silent Martin who sat red-eyed and brooding
over his meal.
‘Interviewed three dozen people, all of them full of the same milk and hogwash,’
said the captain. ‘It’s Burton’s work all right, I’m positive. He’ll be spilling
back in here tomorrow or next week to consolidate his miracles and beat us out
in our contracts. I think I’ll stick on and spoil it for him.’
Martin glanced up sullenly. ‘I’ll kill him,’ he said.
‘Now, now, Martin! There, there, boy.’
‘I’ll kill him’so help me, I will.’
‘We’ll put an anchor on his wagon. You have to admit he’s clever. Unethical but
clever.’
‘He’s dirty.’
‘You must promise not to do anything violent.’ Captain Hart checked his figures.
‘According to this, there were thirty miracles of healing performed, a blind man
restored to vision, a leper cured. Oh, Burton’s efficient, give him that.’
A gong sounded. A moment later a man ran up. ‘Captain, sir. A report! Burton’s
ship is coming down. Also the Ashley ship, sir!’
‘See!’ Captain Hart beat the table. ‘Here come the jackals to the harvest! They
can’t wait to feed. Wait till I confront them. I’ll make them cut me in on this
feast’I will!’
Martin looked sick. He stared at the captain.
‘Business, my dear boy, business,’ said the captain.
Everybody looked up. Two rockets swung down out of the sky.
When the rockets landed they almost crashed.
‘What’s wrong with those fools?’ cried the captain, jumping up. The men ran
across the meadowlands to the steaming ships.
The captain arrived. The airlock door popped open on Burton’s ship.
A man fell out into their arms.
‘What’s wrong?’ cried Captain Hart.
The man lay on the ground. They bent over him and he was burned, badly burned.
His body was covered with wounds and scars and tissue that was inflamed and
smoking. He looked up out of puffed eyes and his thick tongue moved in his split
lips.
‘What happened?’ demanded the captain, kneeling down, shaking the man’s arm.
‘Sir, sir,’ whispered the dying man. ‘Forty-eight hours ago, back in Space
Sector Seventy-nine DFS, off Planet One in this system, our ship, and Ashley’s
ship, ran into a cosmic storm, sir.’ Liquid ran gray from the man’s nostrils.
Blood trickled from his mouth. ‘Wiped out. All crew. Burton dead. Ashley died an
hour ago. Only three survivals.’
‘Listen to me!’ shouted Hart bending over the bleeding man. ‘You didn’t come to
this planet before this very hour?’
Silence.
‘Answer me!’ cried Hart.
The dying man said, ‘No. Storm. Burton dead two days ago. This first landing on
any world in six months.’
‘Are you sure?’ shouted Hart, shaking violently, gripping the man in his hands.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Sure, sure,’ mouthed the dying man.
‘Burton died two days ago? You’re positive?’
‘Yes, yes,’ whispered the man. His head fell forward. The man was dead.
The captain knelt beside the silent body. The captain’s face twitched, the
muscles jerking involuntarily. The other members of the crew stood back of him
looking down. Martin waited. The captain asked to be helped to his feet,
finally, and this was done. They stood looking at the city. ‘That means”’
‘That means?’ said Martin.
‘We’re the only ones who’ve been here,’ whispered Captain Hart. ‘And that man”’
‘What about that man, Captain?’ asked Martin.
The captain’s face twitched senselessly. He looked very old indeed, and gray.
His eyes were glazed. He moved forward in the dry grass.
‘Come along, Martin. Come along. Hold me up; for my sake, hold me. I’m afraid
I’ll fall. And hurry. We can’t waste time”’
They moved, stumbling, toward the city, in the long dry grass, in the blowing
wind.
Several hours later they were sitting in the mayor’s auditorium. A thousand
people had come and talked and gone. The captain had remained seated, his face
haggard, listening, listening. There was so much light in the faces of those who
came and testified and talked he could not bear to see them. And all the while
his hands traveled, on his knees, together; on his belt, jerking and quivering.
When it was over, Captain Hart turned to the mayor and with strange eyes said:
‘But you must know where he went?’
‘He didn’t say where he was going,’ replied the mayor.
‘To one of the other nearby worlds?’ demanded the captain.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You must know.’
‘Do you see him?’ asked the mayor, indicating the crowd.
The captain looked. ‘No.’
‘Then he is probably gone,’ said the mayor.
‘Probably, probably!’ cried the captain weakly. ‘I’ve made a horrible mistake,
and I want to see him now. Why, it just came to me, this is a most unusual thing
in history. To be in on something like this. Why, the chances are one in
billions we’d arrived at one certain planet among millions of planets the day
after he came! You must know where he’s gone!’
‘Each finds him in his own way,’ replied the mayor gently.
‘You’re hiding him.’ The captain’s face grew slowly ugly.
Some of the old hardness returned in stages. He began to stand up.
‘No,’ said the mayor.
‘You know where be is then?’ The captain’s fingers twitched at the leather
holster on his right side.
‘I couldn’t tell you where he is, exactly,’ said the mayor.
‘I advise you to start talking,’ and the captain took out a small steel gun.
‘There’s no way,’ said the mayor, ‘to tell you anything.’
‘Liar!’
An expression of pity came into the mayor’s face as he looked at Hart.
‘You’re very tired,’ he said. ‘You’ve traveled a long way and you belong to a
tired people who’ve been without faith a long time, and you want to believe so
much now that you’re interfering with yourself. You’ll only make it harder if
you kill. You’ll never find him that way.
‘Where’d he go? He told you; you know. Come on, tell me!’ The captain waved the
gun.
The mayor shook his head.
‘Tell me! Tell me!’
The gun cracked once, twice. The mayor fell, his arm wounded.
Martin leaped forward. ‘Captain!’
The gun flashed at Martin. ‘Don’t interfere.’
On the floor, holding his wounded arm, the mayor looked up. ‘Put down your gun.
You’re hurting yourself. You’ve never believed, and now that you think you
believe, you hurt people because of it.’
‘I don’t need you,’ said Hart, standing over him. ‘If I missed him by one day
here, I’ll go on to another world. And another and another. I’ll miss him by
half a day on the next planet, maybe, and a quarter of a day on the third
planet, and two hours on the next, and an hour on the next, and half an hour on
the next, and a minute on the next. But after that, one day I’ll catch up with
him! Do you hear that?’ He was shouting now, leaning wearily over the man on the
floor. He staggered with exhaustion. ‘Come along, Martin.’ He let the gun hang
in his hand.
‘No,’ said Martin. ‘I’m staying here.’
‘You’re a fool. Stay if you like. But I’m going on, with the others, as far as I
can go.’
The mayor looked up at Martin. ‘I’ll be all right. Leave me. Others will tend my
wounds.’
‘I’ll be back,’ said Martin. ‘I’ll walk as far as the rocket.’ They walked with
vicious speed through the city. One could see with what effort the captain
struggled to show all the old iron, to keep himself going. When he reached the
rocket he slapped the side of it with a trembling hand. He holstered his gun. He
looked at Martin.
‘Well, Martin?’
Martin looked at him. ‘Well, Captain?’
The captain’s eyes were on the sky. ‘Sure you won’t’come with’with me, eh?’
‘No, sir.’
‘It’ll be a great adventure, by God. I know I’ll find him.’
‘You are set on it now, aren’t you, sir?’ asked Martin.
The captain’s face quivered and his eyes closed. ‘Yes.’
‘There’s one thing I’d like to know.’
‘What?’
‘Sir, when you find him’if you find him,’ asked Martin, ‘what will you ask of
him?’
‘Why” The captain faltered, opening his eyes. His hands clenched and
unclenched. He puzzled a moment and then broke into a strange smile. ‘Why, I’ll
ask him for a little’peace and quiet.’ He touched the rocket. ‘It’s been a long
time, a long, long time since’since I relaxed.’
‘Did you ever just try, Captain?’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Hart.
‘Never mind. So long, Captain.’
‘Good-by, Mr. Martin.’
The crew stood by the port. Out of their number only three were going on with
Hart. Seven others were remaining behind, they said, with Martin.
Captain Hart surveyed them and uttered his verdict: ‘Fools!’ He, last of all,
climbed into the airlock, gave a brisk salute, laughed sharply. The door
slammed.
The rocket lifted into the sky on a pillar of fire.
Martin watched it go far away and vanish.
At the meadow’s edge the mayor, supported by several men, beckoned.
‘He’s gone,’ said Martin, walking up.
‘Yes, poor man, he’s gone,’ said the mayor. ‘And he’ll go on, planet after
planet, seeking and seeking, and always and always he will be an hour late, or a
half hour late, or ten minutes late, or a minute late. And finally he will miss
out by only a few seconds. And when he has visited three hundred worlds and is
seventy or eighty years old he will miss out by only a fraction of a second, and
then a smaller fraction of a second. And he will go on and on, thinking to find
that very thing which he left behind here, on this planet, in this city”
Martin looked steadily at the mayor.
The mayor put out his hand. ‘Was there ever any doubt of it?’ He beckoned to the
others and turned. ‘Come along now. We mustn’t keep him waiting.”
They walked into the city.
The End
Some comments.
Captain Hart is faced with the possibility of this redemption, but makes two mistakes: first, he initially refuses to believe; second, when forced to believe by circumstances, he thinks he can take control of the situation with force.
Faith isn’t about taking control, after all, but releasing control and allowing a higher power to lead the way.
What Hart feels, then, isn’t faith at all, but a kind of agnostic desperation.
Agnosticism is a non-committal attitude to the existence of God: neither atheistic nor believing in God, but instead waiting for solid proof to sway one's position.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
This is a nice short story by Arthur C. Clarke. It is titled “The Star”. It’s actually wonderful. It’s the reason why many of us started reading science fiction short stories in the first place.
The Star
From The Nine Billion Names of God: The Best Short Stories of Arthur C. Clarke
It is three thousand light-years to the Vatican. Once, I believed that space could have no power over faith, just as I believed the heavens declared the glory of God’s handwork. Now I have seen that handiwork, and my faith is sorely troubled. I stare at the crucifix that hangs on the cabin wall above the Mark VI Computer, and for the first time in my life I wonder if it is no more than an empty symbol.
I have told no one yet, but the truth cannot be concealed. The facts are there for all to read, recorded on the countless miles of magnetic tape and the thousands of photographs we are carrying back to Earth. Other scientists can interpret them as easily as I can, and I am not one who would condone that tampering with the truth which often gave my order a bad name in the olden days.
The crew were already sufficiently depressed: I wonder how they will take this ultimate irony. Few of them have any religious faith, yet they will not relish using this final weapon in their campaign against me—that private, good-natured, but fundamentally serious war which lasted all the way from Earth. It amused them to have a Jesuit as chief astrophysicist: Dr. Chandler, for instance, could never get over it. (Why are medical men such notorious atheists?) Sometimes he would meet me on the observation deck, where the lights are always low so that the stars shine with undiminished glory. He would come up to me in the gloom and stand staring out of the great oval port, while the heavens crawled slowly around us as the ship turned over and over with the residual spin we had never bothered to correct.
“Well, Father,” he would say at last, “it goes on forever and forever, and perhaps Something made it. But how you can believe that Something has a special interest in us and our miserable little world—that just beats me.” Then the argument would start, while the stars and nebulae would swing around us in silent, endless arcs beyond the flawlessly clear plastic of the observation port.
It was, I think, the apparent incongruity of my position that cause most amusement among the crew. In vain I pointed to my three papers in the Astrophysical Journal, my five in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. I would remind them that my order has long been famous for its scientific works. We may be few now, but ever since the eighteenth century we have made contributions to astronomy and geophysics out of all proportion to our numbers. Will my report on the Phoenix Nebula end our thousand years of history? It will end, I fear, much more than that.
I do not know who gave the nebula its name, which seems to me a very bad one. If it contains a prophecy, it is one that cannot be verified for several billion years. Even the word “nebula” is misleading; this is a far smaller object than those stupendous clouds of mist—the stuff of unborn stars—that are scattered throughout the length of the Milky Way. On the cosmic scale, indeed, the Phoenix Nebula is a tiny thing—a tenuous shell of gas surrounding a single star.
Or what is left of a star. . .
The Rubens engraving of Loyola seems to mock me as it hangs there above the spectrophotometer tracings. What would you, Father, have made of this knowledge that has come into my keeping, so far from the little world that was all the Universe you knew? Would your faith have risen to the challenge, as mine has failed to do?
You gaze into the distance, Father, but I have traveled a distance beyond any that you could have imagined when you founded our order a thousand years ago. No other survey ship has been so far from Earth: we are at the very frontiers of the explored Universe. We set out to reach the Phoenix Nebula, we succeeded, and we are homeward bound with our burden of knowledge. I wish I could lift that burden from my shoulders, but I call to you in vain across the centuries and the light-years that lie between us.
On the book you are holding the words are plain to read. AD MAIOREM DEI GLORIAM, the message runs, but it is a message I can no longer believe. Would you still believe it, if you could see what we have found?
We knew, of course, what the Phoenix Nebula was. Every year, in our Galaxy alone, more than a hundred stars explode, blazing for a few hours or days with hundreds of times their normal brilliance until they sink back into death and obscurity. Such are the ordinary novas—the commonplace disasters of the Universe. I have recorded the spectrograms and light curves of dozens since I started working at the Lunar Observatory.
But three or four times in every thousand years occurs something beside which even a nova pales into total insignificance.
When a star becomes a supernova, it may for a little while outshine all the massed suns of the Galaxy. The Chinese astronomers watched this happen in A.D. 1054, not knowing what it was they saw. Five centuries later, in 1572, a supernova blazed in Cassiopeia so brilliantly that it was visible in the daylight sky. There have been three more in the thousand years that have passed since then.
Our mission was to visit the remnants of such a catastrophe, to reconstruct the events that led up to it, and, if possible, to learn its cause. We came slowly in through the concentric shells of gas that had been blasted out six thousand years before, yet were expanding still. They were immensely hot, radiating even now with a fierce violet light, but were far too tenuous to do us any damage. When the star had exploded, its outer layers had been driven upward with such speed that they had escaped completely from its gravitational field. Now they formed a hollow shell large enough to engulf a thousand solar systems, and at its center burned the tiny, fantastic object which the star had now become—a White Dwarf, smaller than earth, yet weighing a million times as much.
The glowing gas shells were all around us, banishing the normal night of interstellar space. We were flying into the center of the cosmic bomb that had detonated millennia ago and whose incandescent fragments were still hurtling apart. The immense scale of the explosion, and the fact that the debris already covered a volume of space many millions of miles across, robbed the scene of any visible movement. It would take decades before the unaided eye could detect any motion in these tortured wisps and eddies of gas, yet the sense of turbulent expansion was overwhelming.
We had checked our primary drive hours before, and were drifting slowly toward the fierce little star ahead. Once it had been a sun like our own, but it had squandered in a few hours the energy that should have kept it shining for a million years. Now it was a shrunken miser, hoarding its resources as if trying to make amends for its prodigal youth.
No one seriously expected to find planets. If there had been any before the explosion, they would have been boiled into puffs of vapor, and their substance lost in the greater wreckage of the star itself. But we made the automatic search, as we always do when approaching an unknown sun, and presently we found a single small world circling the star at an immense distance. It must have been the Pluto of this vanished Solar System, orbiting on the frontiers of the night. Too far from the central sun ever to have known life, its remoteness had saved it from the fate of all its lost companions.
The passing fires had seared its rocks and burned away the mantle of frozen gas that must have covered it in the days before the disaster. We landed, and we found the Vault.
Its builders had made sure that we should. The monolithic marker that stood above the entrance was now a fused stump, but even the first long-range photographs told us that here was the work of intelligence. A little later we detected the continent-wide pattern of radioactivity that had been buried in the rock. Even if the pylon above the Vault had been destroyed, this would have remained, an immovable and all-but eternal beacon calling to the stars. Our ship fell toward this gigantic bull’s eye like an arrow into its target.
The pylon must have been a mile high when it was built, but now it looked like a candle that had melted down into a puddle of wax. It took us a week to drill through the fused rock, since we did not have the proper tools for a task like this. We were astronomers, not archaeologists, but we could improvise. Our original purpose was forgotten: this lonely monument, reared with such labor at the greatest possible distance from the doomed sun, could have only one meaning. A civilization that knew it was about to die had made its last bid for immortality.
It will take us generations to examine all the treasures that were placed in the Vault. They had plenty of time to prepare, for their sun must have given its first warnings many years before the final detonation. Everything that they wished to preserve, all the fruits of their genius, they brought here to this distant world in the days before the end, hoping that some other race would find it and that they would not be utterly forgotten. Would we have done as well, or would we have been too lost in our own misery to give thought to a future we could never see or share?
If only they had had a little more time! They could travel freely enough between the planets of their own sun, but they had not yet learned to cross the interstellar gulfs, and the nearest Solar System was a hundred light-years away. Yet even had they possessed the secret of the Transfinite Drive, no more than a few millions could have been saved. Perhaps it was better thus.
Even if they had not been so disturbingly human as their sculpture shows, we could not have helped admiring them and grieving for their fate. They left thousands of visual records and the machines for projecting them, together with elaborate pictorial instructions from which it will not be difficult to learn their written language. We have examined many of these records, and brought to life for the first time in six thousand years the warmth and beauty of a civilization that in many ways must have been superior to our own. Perhaps they only showed us the best, and one can hardly blame them. But their worlds were very lovely, and their cities were built with a grace that matches anything of man’s. We have watched them at work and play, and listened to their musical speech sounding across the centuries. One scene is still before my eyes—a group of children on a beach of strange blue sand, playing in the waves as children play on Earth. Curious whiplike trees line the shore, and some very large animal is wading in the shallows, yet attracting no attention at all.
And sinking into the sea, still warm and friendly and life-giving, is the sun that will soon turn traitor and obliterate all this innocent happiness.
Perhaps if we had not been so far from home and so vulnerable to loneliness, we should not have been so deeply moved. Many of us had seen the ruins of ancient civilizations on other worlds, but they had never affected us so profoundly. This tragedy was unique. It is one thing for a race to fail and die, as nations and cultures have done on Earth. But to be destroyed so completely in the full flower of its achievement, leaving no survivors—how could that be reconciled with the mercy of God?
My colleagues have asked me that, and I have given what answers I can. Perhaps you could have done better, Father Loyola, but I have found nothing in the Exercitia Spiritualia that helps me here. They were not an evil people: I do not know what gods they worshiped, if indeed they worshiped any. But I have looked back at them across the centuries, and have watched while the loveliness they used their last strength to preserve was brought forth again into the light of their shrunken sun. They could have taught us much: why were they destroyed?
I know the answers that my colleagues will give when they get back to Earth. They will say that the Universe has no purpose and no plan, that since a hundred suns explode every year in our Galaxy, at this very moment some race is dying in the depths of space. Whether that race has done good or evil during its lifetime will make no difference in the end: there is no divine justice, for there is no God.
Yet, of course, what we have seen proves nothing of the sort. Anyone who argues thus is being swayed by emotion, not logic. God has no need to justify His actions to man. He who built the Universe can destroy it when He chooses. It is arrogance—it is perilously near blasphemy—for us to say what He may or may not do.
This I could have accepted, hard though it is to look upon whole worlds and peoples thrown into the furnace. But there comes a point when even the deepest faith must falter, and now, as I look at the calculations lying before me, I have reached that point at last.
We could not tell, before we reached the nebula, how long ago the explosion took place. Now, from the astronomical evidence and the record in the rocks of that one surviving planet, I have been able to date it very exactly. I know in what year the light of this colossal conflagration reached the Earth. I know how brilliantly the supernova whose corpse now dwindles behind our speeding ship once shone in terrestrial skies. I know how it must have blazed low in the east before sunrise, like a beacon in that oriental dawn.
There can be no reasonable doubt: the ancient mystery is solved at last. Yet, oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?
The End
Do you want more?
I hope that you enjoyed this. I have more posts in my fictional story index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
While Ray Bradbury is most well known for his science fiction and dystopian writings, I consider the Story of Love to be on par in quality and enchantment to his other works. This short story explores the constraints that society puts on love and recognizes that affections cannot always be pursued.
That was the week Ann Taylor came to teach summer school at Green Town Central. It was the summer of her twenty-fourth birthday, and it was the summer when Bob Spaulding was just fourteen.
Everyone remembered Ann Taylor, for she was that teacher for whom all the children wanted to bring huge oranges or pink flowers, and for whom they rolled up the rustling green and yellow maps of the world without being asked. She was that woman who always seemed to be passing by on days when the shade was green under the tunnels of oaks and elms in the old town, her face shifting with the bright shadows as she walked, until it was all things to all people. She was the fine peaches of summer in the snow of winter, and she was cool milk for cereal on a hot early-June morning. Whenever you needed an opposite, Ann Taylor was there. And those rare few days in the world when the climate was balanced as fine as a maple leaf between winds that blew just right, those were the days like Ann Taylor, and should have been so named on the calendar.
As for Bob Spaulding, he was the cousin who walked alone through town on any October evening with a pack of leaves after him like a horde of Hallowe’en mice, or you would see him, like a slow white fish in spring in the tart waters of the Fox Hill Creek, baking brown with the shine of a chestnut to his face by autumn. Or you might hear his voice in those treetops where the wind entertained; dropping down hand by hand, there would come Bob Spaulding to sit alone and look at the world, and later you might see him on the lawn with the ants crawling over his books as he read through the long afternoons alone, or played himself a game of chess on Grandmother’s porch, or picked out a solitary tune upon the black piano in the bay window. You never saw him with any other child.
That first morning, Miss Ann Taylor entered through the side door of the schoolroom and all of the children sat still in their seats as they saw her write her name on the board in a nice round lettering.
“My name is Ann Taylor,” she said, quietly. “And I’m your new teacher.”
The room seemed suddenly flooded with illumination, as if the roof had moved back; and the trees were full of singing birds. Bob Spaulding sat with a spitball he had just made, hidden in his hand. After a half hour of listening to Miss Taylor, he quietly let the spitball drop to the floor.
That day, after class, he brought in a bucket of water and a rag and began to wash the boards.
“What’s this?” She turned to him from her desk, where she had been correcting spelling papers.
“The boards are kind of dirty,” said Bob, at work.
“Yes. I know. Are you sure you want to clean them?”
“I suppose I should have asked permission,” he said, halting uneasily.
“I think we can pretend you did,” she replied, smiling, and at this smile he finished the boards in an amazing burst of speed and pounded the erasers so furiously that the air was full of snow, it seemed, outside the open window.
“Let’s see,” said Miss Taylor. “You’re Bob Spaulding, aren’t you?”
“Yes’m.”
“Well, thank you, Bob.”
“Could I do them every day?” he asked.
“Don’t you think you should let the others try?”
“I’d like to do them,” he said. “Every day.”
“We’ll try it for a while and see,” she said.
He lingered.
“I think you’d better run on home,” she said, finally.
“Good night.” He walked slowly and was gone.
The next morning he happened by the place where she took board and room just as she was coming out to walk to school.
“Well, here I am,” he said.
“And do you know,” she said, “I’m not surprised.”
They walked together.
“May I carry your books?” he asked.
“Why, thank you, Bob.”
“It’s nothing,” he said, taking them.
They walked for a few minutes and he did not say a word. She glanced over and slightly down at him and saw how at ease he was and how happy he seemed, and she decided to let him break the silence, but he never did. When they reached the edge of the school ground he gave the books back to her. “I guess I better leave you here,” he said. “The other kids wouldn’t understand.”
“I’m not sure I do, either, Bob,” said Miss Taylor.
“Why we’re friends,” said Bob earnestly and with a great natural honesty.
“Bob –” she started to say.
“Yes’m?”
“Never mind.” She walked away.
“I’ll be in class,” he said.
And he was in class, and he was there after school every night for the next two weeks, never saying a word, quietly washing the boards and cleaning the erasers and rolling up the maps while she worked at her papers, and there was that clock silence of four o’clock, the silence of the sun going down in the slow sky, the silence with the catlike sound of erasers patted together, and the drip of water from a moving sponge, and the rustle and turn of papers and the scratch of a pen, and perhaps the buzz of a fly banging with a tiny high anger against the tallest clear pane of window in the room. Sometimes the silence would go on this way until almost five, when Miss Taylor would find Bob Spaulding in the last seat of the room, sitting and looking at her silently, waiting for further orders.
“Well, it’s time to go home,” Miss Taylor would say, getting up.
“Yes’m.”
And he would run to fetch her hat and coat. He would also lock the school-room door for her unless the janitor was coming in later. Then they would walk out of school and across the yard, which was empty, the janitor taking down the chain swings slowly on his stepladder, the sun behind the umbrella trees. They talked of all sorts of things.
“And what are you going to be, Bob, when you grow up?”
“A writer,” he said.
“Oh, that’s a big ambition: it takes a lot of work.”
“I know, but I’m going to try,” he said. “I’ve read a lot.”
“Bob, haven’t you anything to do after school?”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, I hate to see you kept in so much, washing the boards.”
“I like it,” he said. “I never do what I don’t like.”
“But nevertheless.”
“No, I’ve got to to that,” he said. He thought for a while and said, “Do me a favour, Miss Taylor?”
“It all depends.”
“I walk every Saturday from out around Buetrick Street along the creek to Lake Michigan. There’s a lot of butterflies and crayfish and birds. Maybe you’d like to walk, too.”
“Thank you,” he said.
“Then you’ll come?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Don’t you think it’d be fun?”
“Yes, I’m sure of that, but I’m going to be busy.”
He started to ask what, but stopped.
“I take along sandwiches,” he said. “Ham-and-pickle ones. And orange pop and just walk along, taking my time. I get down to the lake about noon and walk back and get home about three o’clock. It makes a real fine day, and I wish you’d come. Do you collect butterflies? I have a big collection. We could start one for you.”
“Thanks, Bob, but no, perhaps some other time.”
He looked at her and said, “I shouldn’t have asked you, should I?”
“You have every right to ask anything you want to,” she said.
A few days later she found an old copy of `Great Expectations’, which she no longer wanted, and gave it to Bob. He was very grateful and took it home and stayed up that night and read it through and talked about it the next morning. Each day now he met her just beyond sight of her boarding house and many days she would start to say, “Bob –” and tell him not to come to meet her any more, but she never finished saying it, and he talked with her about Dickens and Kipling and Poe and others, coming and going to school. She found a butterfly on her desk on Friday morning. She almost waved it away before she found it was dead and had been placed there while she was out of the room. She glanced at Bob over the heads of her other students, but he was looking at his book; not reading, just looking at it.
It was about this time that she found it impossible to call on Bob to recite in class. She would hover her pencil about his name and then call the next person up or down the list. Nor would she look at him while they were walking to or from school. But on several late afternoons as he moved his arm high on the blackboard, sponging away the arithmetic symbols, she found herself glancing over at him for a few seconds at a time before she returned to her papers.
And then on Saturday morning he was standing in the middle of the creek with his overalls rolled up to his knees, kneeling down to catch a crayfish under a rock, when he looked up and there on the edge of the running stream was Miss Ann Taylor.
“Well, here I am,” she said, laughing.
“And do you know,” he said, “I’m not surprised.”
“Show me the crayfish and the butterflies,” she said.
They walked down to the lake and sat on the sand with a warm wind blowing softly about them, fluttering her hair and the ruffle of her blouse, and he sat a few yards back from her and they ate the ham-and-pickle sandwiches and drank the orange pop solemnly.
“Gee, this is swell,” he said. “This is the swellest time ever in my life.”
“I didn’t think I would ever come on a picnic like this,” she said.
“With some kid,” he said.
“I’m comfortable, however,” she said.
“That’s good news.”
They said little else during the afternoon.
“This is all wrong,” he said, later. “And I can’t figure out why it should be. Just walking along and catching old butterflies and crayfish and eating sandwiches. But Mom and Dad’d rib the heck out of me if they knew, and the kids would, too. And the other teachers, I suppose, would laugh at you, wouldn’t they?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“I guess we better not do any more butterfly catching, then.”
“I don’t exactly understand how I came here at all,” she said.
And the day was over.
That was about all there was to the meeting of Ann Taylor and Bob Spaulding, two or three monarch butterflies, a copy of Dickens, a dozen crayfish, four sandwiches and two bottles of Orange Crush. The next Monday, quite unexpectedly, though he waited a long time, Bob did not see Miss Taylor come out to walk to school, but discovered later that she had left earlier and was already at school. Also, Monday night, she left early, with a headache, and another teacher finished her last class. He walked by her boarding house but did not see her anywhere, and he was afraid to ring the bell and inquire.
On Tuesday night after school they were both in the silent room again, he sponging the board contentedly, as if this time might go on forever, and she seated, working on her papers as if she, too, would be in this room and this particular peace and happiness forever, when suddenly the courthouse clock struck. It was a block away and its great bronze boom shuddered one’s body and made the ash of time shake away off your bones and slide through your blood, making you seem older by the minute. Stunned by that clock, you could not but sense the crashing flow of time, and as the clock said five o’clock, Miss Taylor suddenly looked up at it for a long time, and then she put down her pen.
“Bob,” she said.
He turned, startled. Neither of them had spoken in the peaceful and good hour before.
“Will you come here?” she asked.
He put down the sponge slowly.
“Yes,” he said.
“Bob, I want you to sit down.”
“Yes’m.”
She looked at him intently for a moment until he looked away. “Bob, I wonder if you know what I’m going to talk to you about. Do you know?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe it’d be a good idea if you told me, first.”
“About us,” he said, at last.
“How old are you, Bob?”
“Going on fourteen.”
“You’re thirteen years old.”
He winced. “Yes’m.”
“And do you know how old I am?”
“Yes’m. I heard. Twenty-four.”
“Twenty-four.”
“I’ll be twenty-four in ten years, almost,” he said.
“But unfortunately you’re not twenty-four now.”
“No, but sometimes I feel twenty-four.”
“Yes, and sometimes you almost act it.”
“Do I, really!”
“Now sit still there, don’t bound around, we’ve a lot to discuss. It’s very important that we understand exactly what is happening, don’t you agree?”
“Yes, I guess so.”
“First, let’s admit that we are the greatest and best friends in the world. Let’s admit I have never had a student like you, nor have I had as much affection for any boy I’ve ever known.” He flushed at this. She went on. “And let me speak for you — you’ve found me to be the nicest teacher of all teachers you’ve ever known.”
“Oh, more than that,” he said.
“Perhaps more than that, but there are facts to be faced and an entire way of life to be considered. I’ve thought this over for a good many days, Bob. Don’t think I’ve missed anything, or been unaware of my own feelings in the matter. Under any normal circumstances our friendship would be odd indeed. But then you are no ordinary boy. I know myself pretty well, I think, and I know I’m not sick, either mentally or physically, and that whatever has evolved here has been a true regard for your character and goodness, Bob; but those are not the things we consider in this world, Bob, unless they occur in a man of a certain age. I don’t know if I’m saying this right.”
“It’s all right,” he said. “It’s just if I was ten years older and about fifteen inches taller it’d make all the difference, and that’s silly,” he said, “to go by how tall a person is.”
“The world hasn’t found it so.”
“I’m not all the world,” he protested.
“I know it seems foolish,” she said. “When you feel very grown up and right and have nothing to be ashamed of. You have nothing at all to be ashamed of, Bob, remember that. You have been very honest and good, and I hope I have been, too.”
“You have,” he said.
“In an ideal climate, Bob, maybe someday they will be able to judge the oldness of a person’s mind so accurately that they can say, `This is a man, though his body is only thirteen; by some miracle of circumstances and fortune, this is a man, with a man’s recognition of responsibility and position and duty’; but until that day, Bob, I’m afraid we’re going to have to go by ages and heights and the ordinary way in an ordinary world.”
“I don’t like that,” he said.
“Perhaps I don’t like it, either, but do you want to end up far unhappier than you are now? Do you want both of us to be unhappy? Which we certainly would be. There really is no way to do anything about us — it is so strange even to try to talk about us.”
“Yes’m.”
“But at least we know all about us and the fact that we have been right and fair and good and there is nothing wrong with our knowing each other, nor did we ever intend that it should be, for we both understand how impossible it is, don’t we?”
“Yes, I know. But I can’t help it.”
“Now we must decide what to do about it,” she said. “Now only you and I know about this. Later, others might know. I can secure a transfer from this school to another one –“
“No!”
“Or I can have you transferred to another school.”
“You don’t have to do that,” he said.
“Why?”
“We’re moving. My folks and I, we’re going to live in Madison. We’re leaving next week.”
“It has nothing to do with all this, has it?”
“No, no, everything’s all right. It’s just that my father has a new job there. It’s only fifty miles away. I can see you, can’t I, when I come to town?”
“Do you think that would be a good idea?”
“No, I guess not.”
They sat awhile in the silent schoolroom.
“When did all of this happen?” he said, helplessly.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Nobody ever knows. They haven’t known for thousands of years, and I don’t think they ever will. People either like each other or don’t, and sometimes two people like each other who shouldn’t. I can’t explain myself, and certainly you can’t explain you.”
“I guess I’d better get home,” he said.
“You’re not mad at me, are you?”
“Oh, gosh no, I could never be mad at you.”
“There’s one more thing. I want you to remember, there are compensations in life. There always are, or we wouldn’t go on living. You don’t feel well, now; neither do I. But something will happen to fix that. Do you believe that?”
“I’d like to.”
“Well, it’s true.”
“If only,” he said.
“What?”
“If only you’d wait for me,” he blurted.
“Ten years?”
“I’d be twenty-four then.”
“But I’d be thirty-four and another person entirely, perhaps. No, I don’t think it can be done.”
“Wouldn’t you like it to be done?” he cried.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “It’s silly and it wouldn’t work, but I would like it very much.”
He sat there a long time.
“I’ll never forget you,” he said.
“It’s nice for you to say that, even though it can’t be true, because life isn’t that way. You’ll forget.”
“I’ll never forget. I’ll find a way of never forgetting you,” he said.
She got up and went to erase the boards.
“I’ll help you,” he said.
“No, no,” she said, hastily. “You go on now, get home, and no more tending to the boards after school. I’ll assign Helen Stevens to do it.”
He left the school. Looking back, outside, he saw Miss Ann Taylor, for the last time, at the board, slowly washing out the chalked words, her hand moving up and down.
He moved away from the town the next week and was gone for sixteen years. Though he was only fifty miles away, he never got down to Green Town again until he was almost thirty and married, and then one spring they were driving through on their way to Chicago and stopped off for a day.
Bob left his wife at the hotel and walked around town and finally asked about Miss Ann Taylor, but no-one remembered at first, and then one of them remembered.
“Oh, yes, the pretty teacher. She died in 1936, not long after you left.”
Had she ever married? No, come to think of it, she never had.
He walked out to the cemetery in the afternoon and found her stone, which said “Ann Taylor, born 1910, died 1936.” And he thought, Twenty-six years old. Why I’m three years older than you are now, Miss Taylor.
Later in the day the people in the town saw Bob Spaulding’s wife strolling to meet him under the elm trees and the oak trees, and they all turned to watch her pass, for her face shifted with bright shadows as she walked; she was the fine peaches of summer in the snow of winter, and she was cool milk for cereal on a hot early-summer morning. And this was one of those rare few days in time when the climate was balanced like a maple leaf between winds that blow just right, one of those days that should have been named, everyone agreed, after Robert Spaulding’s wife.
The End
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Here is a classic story from Ray Bradbury. It’s titled “The Rocket Man.” It’s one of the first groups (or clusters) of stories that he compiled. And it’s a real beauty. It was written at a time when everyone thought of space and science fiction as gorilla suits and deep sea diving helmets, that rode in flying silver saucers that came from Mars. Here, he talks about the dreams of the man of a household and the consequences of him following that dream on those left behind.
It’s wonderful. Enjoy.
Ray Bradbury. The Rocket Man
The Rocket Man 1951
The electrical fireflies were hovering above Mother’s dark hair to light her path. She stood in her bedroom door looking out at me as I passed in the silent hall. “You will help me keep him here this time, won’t you?” she asked. “I guess so,” I said. “Please.” The fireflies cast moving bits of light on her white face. “This time he mustn’t go away again.” “All right,” I said, after standing there a moment. “But it won’t do any good; it’s no use.” She went away, and the fireflies, on their electric circuits, fluttered after her like an errant constellation, showing her how to walk in darkness. I heard her say, faintly, “We’ve got to try, anyway.” Other fireflies followed me to my room. When the weight of my body cut a circuit in the bed, the fireflies winked out. It was midnight, and my mother and I waited, our rooms separated by darkness, in bed. The bed began to rock me and sing to me. I touched a switch; the singing and rocking stopped. I didn’t want to sleep. I didn’t want to sleep at all. This night was no different from a thousand others in our time. We would wake nights and feel the cool air turn hot, feel the fire in the wind, or see the walls burned a bright color for an instant, and then we knew his rocket was over our house-his rocket, and the oak trees swaying from the concussion. And I would lie there, eyes wide, panting, and Mother in her room. Her voice would come to me over the interroom radio: “Did you feel it?” And I would answer, “That was him, all right.” That was my father’s ship passing over our town, a small town where space rockets never came, and we would lie awake for the next two hours, thinking, “Now Dad’s landed in Springfield, now he’s on the tarmac, now he’s signing the papers, now he’s in the helicopter, now he’s over the river, now the hills, now he’s settling the helicopter in at the little airport at Green Village here….” And the night would be half over when, in our separate cool beds, Mother and I would be listening, listening. “Now he’s walking down Bell Street. He always walks … never takes a cab … now across the park, now turning the comer of Oakhurst and now…” I lifted my head from my pillow. Far down the street, coming closer and closer, smartly, quickly, briskly-footsteps. Now turning in at our house, up the porch steps. And we were both smiling in the cool darkness. Mom and I, when we heard the front door open in recognition, speak a quiet word of welcome, and shut, downstairs…. Three hours later I turned the brass knob to their room quietly, holding my breath, balancing in a darkness as big as the space between the planets, my hand out to reach the small black case at the foot of my parents’ sleeping bed. Taking it, I ran silently to my room, thinking, He won’t tell me, he doesn’t want me to know. And from the opened case spilled his black uniform, like a black nebula, stars glittering here or there, distantly, in the material. I kneaded the dark stuff in my warm hands; I smelled the planet Mars, an iron smell, and the planet Venus, a green ivy smell, and the planet Mercury, a scent of sulphur and fire; and I could smell the milky moon and the hardness of stars. I pushed the uniform into a centrifuge machine I’d built in my ninth-grade shop that year, set it whirling. Soon a fine powder precipitated into a retort. This I slid under a microscope. And while my parents slept unaware, and while our house was asleep, all the automatic bakers and servers and robot cleaners in an electric slumber, I stared down upon brilliant motes of meteor dust, comet tail, and loam from far Jupiter glistening like worlds themselves which drew me down the tube a billion miles into space, at terrific accelerations. At dawn, exhausted with my journey and fearful of discovery, I returned the boxed uniform to their sleeping room. Then I slept, only to waken at the sound of the horn of the dry-cleaning car which stopped in the yard below. They took the black uniform box with them. It’s good I didn’t wait, I thought. For the uniform would be back in an hour, clean of all its destiny and travel. I slept again, with the little vial of magical dust in my pajama pocket, over my beating heart. When I came downstairs, there was Dad at the breakfast table, biting into his toast. “Sleep good, Doug?” he said, as if he had been here all the time, and hadn’t been gone for three months. “All right,” I said. “Toast?” He pressed a button and the breakfast table made me four pieces, golden brown. I remember my father that afternoon, digging and digging in the garden, like an animal after something, it seemed. There he was with his long dark arms moving swiftly, planting, tamping, fixing, cutting, pruning, his dark face always down to the soil, his eyes always down to what he was doing, never up to the sky, never looking at me, or Mother, even, unless we knelt with him to feel the earth soak up through the overalls at our knees, to put our hands into the black dirt and not look at the bright, crazy sky. Then he would glance to either side, to Mother or me, and give us a gentle wink, and go on, bent down, face down, the sky staring at his back. That night we sat on the mechanical porch swing which swung us and blew a wind upon us and sang to us. It was summer and moonlight and we had lemonade to drink, and we held the cold glasses in our hands, and Dad read the stereo-newspapers inserted into the special hat you put on your head and which turned the microscopic page in front of the magnifying lens if you blinked three times in succession. Dad smoked cigarettes and told me about how it was when he was a boy in the year 1997. After a while he said, as he had always said, “Why aren’t you out playing kick-the-can, Doug?” I didn’t say anything, but Mom said, “He does, on nights when you’re not here.” Dad looked at me and then, for the first time that day, at the sky. Mother always watched him when he glanced at the stars. The first day and night when he got home he wouldn’t look at the sky much. I thought about him gardening and gardening so furiously, his face almost driven into the earth. But the second night he looked at the stars a little more. Mother wasn’t afraid of the sky in the day so much, but it was the night stars that she wanted to turn off, and sometimes I could almost see her reaching for a switch in her mind, but never finding it. And by the third night maybe Dad’d be out here on the porch until way after we were all ready for bed, and then I’d hear Mom call him in, almost like she called me from the street at times. And then I would hear Dad fitting the electric-eye door lock in place, with a sigh. And the next morning at breakfast I’d glance down and see his little black case near his feet as he buttered his toast and Mother slept late. “Well, be seeing you, Doug,” he’d say, and we’d shake hands. “In about three months?” “Right.” And he’d walk away down the street, not taking a helicopter or beetle or bus, just walking with his uniform hidden in his small underarm case; he didn’t want anyone to think he was vain about being a Rocket Man. Mother would come out to eat breakfast, one piece of dry toast, about an hour later. But now it was tonight, the first night, the good night, and he wasn’t looking at the stars much at all. “Let’s go to the television carnival,” I said. “Fine,” said Dad. Mother smiled at me. And we rushed off to town in a helicopter and took Dad through a thousand exhibits, to keep his face and head down with us and not looking anywhere else. And as we laughed at the funny things and looked serious at the serious ones, I thought. My father goes to Saturn and Neptune and Pluto, but he never brings me presents. Other boys whose fathers go into space bring back bits of ore from Callisto and hunks of black meteor or blue sand. But I have to get my own collection, trading from other boys, the Martian rocks and Mercurian sands which filled my room, but about which Dad would never comment. On occasion, I remembered, he brought something for Mother. He planted some Martian sunflowers once in our yard, but after he was gone a month and the sunflowers grew large. Mom ran out one day and cut them all down. Without thinking, as we paused at one of the three-dimensional exhibits, I asked Dad the question I always asked: “What’s it like, out in space?” Mother shot me a frightened glance. It was too late. Dad stood there for a full half minute trying to find an answer, then he shrugged. “It’s the best thing in a lifetime of best things.” Then he caught himself. “Oh, it’s really nothing at all. Routine. You wouldn’t like it.” He looked at me, apprehensively. “But you always go back.” “Habit.” “Where’re you going next?” “I haven’t decided yet. I’ll think it over.” He always thought it over. In those days rocket pilots were rare and he could pick and choose work when he liked. On the third night of his homecoming you could see him picking and choosing among the stars. “Come on,” said Mother, “let’s go home.” It was still early when we got home. I wanted Dad to put on his uniform. I shouldn’t have asked-it always made Mother unhappy-but I could not help myself. I kept at him, though he had always refused. I had never seen him in it, and at last he said, “Oh, all right.” We waited in the parlor while he went upstairs in the air flue. Mother looked at me dully, as if she couldn’t believe that her own son could do this to her. I glanced away. “I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re not helping at all,” she said. “At all.” There was a whisper in the air flue a moment later. “Here I am,” said Dad quietly. We looked at him in his uniform. It was glossy black with silver buttons and silver rims to the heels of the black boots, and it looked as if someone had cut the arms and legs and body from a dark nebula, with little faint stars glowing through it. It fit as close as a glove fits to a slender long hand, and it smelled like cool air and metal and space. It smelled of fire and time. Father stood, smiling awkwardly, in the center of the room. “Turn around,” said Mother. Her eyes were remote, looking at him. When he was gone, she never talked of him. She never said anything about anything but the weather or the condition of my neck and the need of a washcloth for it, or the fact that she didn’t sleep nights. Once she said the light was too strong at night. “But there’s no moon this week,” I said. “There’s starlight,” she said. I went to the store and bought her some darker, greener shades. As I lay in bed at night, I could hear her pull them down tight to the bottom of the windows. It made a long rustling noise. Once I tried to mow the lawn. “No.” Mom stood in the door. “Put the mower away.” So the grass went three months at a time without cutting. Dad cut it when he came home. She wouldn’t let me do anything else either, like repairing the electrical breakfast maker or the mechanical book reader. She saved everything up, as if for Christmas. And then I would see Dad hammering or tinkering, and always smiling at his work, and Mother smiling over him, happy. No, she never talked of him when he was gone. And as for Dad, he never did anything to make a contact across the millions of miles. He said once, “If I called you, I’d want to be with you. I wouldn’t be happy.” Once Dad said to me, “Your mother treats me, sometimes, as if I weren’t here-as if I were invisible.” I had seen her do it. She would look just beyond him, over his shoulder, at his chin or hands, but never into his eyes. If she did look at his eyes, her eyes were covered with a film, like an animal going to sleep. She said yes at the right times, and smiled, but always a half second later than expected. “I’m not there for her,” said Dad. But other days she would be there and he would be there for her, and they would hold hands and walk around the block, or take rides, with Mom’s hair flying like a girl’s behind her, and she would cut off all the mechanical devices in the kitchen and bake him incredible cakes and pies and cookies, looking deep into his face, her smile a real smile. But at the end of such days when he was there to her, she would always cry. And Dad would stand helpless, gazing about the room as if to find the answer, but never finding it. Dad turned slowly, in his uniform, for us to see. “Turn around again,” said Mom. The next morning Dad came rushing into the house with handfuls of tickets. Pink rocket tickets for California, blue tickets for Mexico. “Come on!” he said. “We’ll buy disposable clothes and bum them when they’re soiled. Look, we take the noon rocket to L. A., the two-o’clock helicopter to Santa Barbara, the nine-o’clock plane to Ensenada, sleep overnight!” And we went to California and up and down the Pacific Coast for a day and a half, settling at last on the sands of Malibu to cook wieners at night. Dad was always listening or singing or watching things on all sides of him, holding onto things as if the world were a centrifuge going so swiftly that he might be flung off away from us at any instant. The last afternoon at Malibu Mom was up in the hotel room. Dad lay on the sand beside me for a long time in the hot sun. “Ah,” he sighed, “this is it.” His eyes were gently closed; he lay on his back, drinking the sun. “You miss this,” he said. He meant “on the rocket,” of course. But he never said “the rocket” or mentioned the rocket and all the things you couldn’t have on the rocket. You couldn’t have a salt wind on the rocket or a blue sky or a yellow sun or Mom’s cooking. You couldn’t talk to your fourteen-year-old boy on a rocket. “Let’s hear it,’ he said at last. And I knew that now we would talk, as we had always talked, for three hours straight. All afternoon we would murmur back and forth in the lazy sun about my school grades, how high I could jump, how fast I could swim. Dad nodded each time I spoke and smiled and slapped my chest lightly in approval. We talked. We did not talk of rockets or space, but we talked of Mexico, where we had driven once in an ancient car, and of the butterflies we had caught in the rain forests of green warm Mexico at noon, seeing the hundred butterflies sucked to our radiator, dying there, beating their blue and crimson wings, twitching, beautiful, and sad. We talked of such things instead of the things I wanted to talk about. And he listened to me. That was the thing he did, as if he was trying to fill himself up with all the sounds he could hear. He listened to the wind and the falling ocean and my voice, always with a rapt attention, a concentration that almost excluded physical bodies themselves and kept only the sounds. He shut his eyes to listen. I would see him listening to the lawn mower as he cut the grass by hand instead of using the remote-control device, and I would see him smelling the cut grass as it sprayed up at him behind the mower in a green fount. “Doug,” he said, about five in the afternoon, as we were picking up our towels and heading back along the beach near the surf, “I want you to promise me something.” “What?” “Don’t ever be a Rocket Man.” I stopped. “I mean it,” he said. “Because when you’re out there you want to be here, and when you’re here you want to be out there. Don’t start that. Don’t let it get hold of you.” “But-“ “You don’t know what it is. Every time I’m out there I think, If I ever get back to Earth I’ll stay there; I’ll never go out again. But I go out, and I guess I’ll always go out.” “I’ve thought about being a Rocket Man for a long time,” I said. He didn’t hear me. “I try to stay here. Last Saturday when I got home I started trying so damned hard to stay here.” I remembered him in the garden, sweating, and all the traveling and doing and listening, and I knew that he did this to convince himself that the sea and the towns and the land and his family were the only real things and the good things. But I knew where he would be tonight: looking at the jewelry in Orion from our front porch. “Promise me you won’t be like me,” he said. I hesitated awhile. “Okay,” I said. He shook my hand. “Good boy,” he said. The dinner was fine that night. Mom had run about the kitchen with handfuls of cinnamon and dough and pots and pans tinkling, and now a great turkey fumed on the table, with dressing, cranberry sauce, peas, and pumpkin pie. “In the middle of August?” said Dad, amazed. “You won’t be here for Thanksgiving.” “So I won’t.” He sniffed it. He lifted each lid from each tureen and let the flavor steam over his sunburned face. He said “Ah” to each. He looked at the room and his hands. He gazed at the pictures on the wall, the chairs, the table, me, and Mom. He cleared his throat. I saw him make up his mind. “Lilly?” “Yes?” Mom looked across her table which she had set like a wonderful silver trap, a miraculous gravy pit into which, like a struggling beast of the past caught in a tar pool, her husband might at last be caught and held, gazing out through a jail of wishbones, safe forever. Her eyes sparkled. “Lilly,” said Dad. Go on, I thought crazily. Say it, quick; say you’ll stay home this time, for good, and never go away; say it! Just then a passing helicopter jarred the room and the window pane shook with a crystal sound. Dad glanced at the window. The blue stars of evening were there, and the red planet Mars was rising in the East. Dad looked at Mars a full minute. Then he put his hand out blindly toward me. “May I have some peas,” he said. “Excuse me,” said Mother. “I’m going to get some bread.” She rushed out into the kitchen. “But there’s bread on the table,” I said. Dad didn’t look at me as he began his meal. I couldn’t sleep that night. I came downstairs at one in the morning and the moonlight was like ice on all the housetops, and dew glittered in a snow field on our grass. I stood in the doorway in my pajamas, feeling the warm night wind, and then I knew that Dad was sitting in the mechanical porch swing, gliding gently. I could see his profile tilted back, and he was watching the stars wheel over the sky. His eyes were like gray crystal there, the moon in each one. I went out and sat beside him. We glided awhile in the swing. At last I said, “How many ways are there to die in space?” “A million.” “Name some.” “The meteors hit you. The air goes out of your rocket. Or comets take you along with them. Concussion. Strangulation. Explosion. Centrifugal force. Too much acceleration. Too little. The heat, the cold, the sun, the moon, the stars, the planets, the asteroids, the planetoids, radiation….” “And do they bury you?” “They never find you.” “Where do you go?” “A billion miles away. Traveling graves, they call them. You become a meteor or a planetoid traveling forever through space.” I said nothing. “One thing,” he said later, “it’s quick in space. Death. It’s over like that. You don’t linger. Most of the time you don’t even know it. You’re dead and that’s it.” We went up to bed. It was morning. Standing in the doorway, Dad listened to the yellow canary singing in its golden cage. “Well, I’ve decided,” he said. “Next time I come home, I’m home to stay.” “Dad!” I said. “Tell your mother that when she gets up,” he said. “You mean it!” He nodded gravely. “See you in about three months.” And there he went off down the street, carrying his uniform in its secret box, whistling and looking at the tall green trees and picking chinaberries off the chinaberry bush as he brushed by, tossing them ahead of him as he walked away into the bright shade of early morning…. I asked Mother about a few things that mom-ing after Father had been gone a number of hours. “Dad said that sometimes you don’t act as if you hear or see him,” I said. And then she explained everything to me quietly. “When he went off into space ten years ago, I said to myself, ‘He’s dead.’ Or as good as dead. So think of him dead. And when he comes back, three or four times a year, it’s not him at all, it’s only a pleasant little memory or a dream. And if a memory stops or a dream stops, it can’t hurt half as much. So most of the time I think of him dead-“ “But other times-“ “Other times I can’t help myself. I bake pies and treat him as if he were alive, and then it hurts. No, it’s better to think he hasn’t been here for ten years and I’ll never see him again. It doesn’t hurt as much.” “Didn’t he say next time he’d settle down.” She shook her head slowly. “No, he’s dead. I’m very sure of that.” “He’ll come alive again, then,” 1 said. “Ten years ago,” said Mother, “I thought, What if he dies on Venus? Then we’ll never be able to see Venus again. What if he dies on Mars? We’ll never be able to look at Mars again, all red in the sky, without wanting to go in and lock the door. Or what if he died on Jupiter or Saturn or Neptune? On those nights when those planets were high in the sky, we wouldn’t want to have anything to do with the stars.” “I guess not,” I said. The message came the next day. The messenger gave it to me and I read it standing on the porch. The sun was setting. Mom stood in the screen door behind me, watching me fold the message and put it in my pocket. “Mom,” I said. “Don’t tell me anything I don’t already know,” she said. She didn’t cry. Well, it wasn’t Mars, and it wasn’t Venus, and it wasn’t Jupiter or Saturn that killed him. We wouldn’t have to think of him every time Jupiter or Saturn or Mars lit up the evening sky. This was different. His ship had fallen into the sun. And the sun was big and fiery and merciless, and it was always in the sky and you couldn’t get away from it. So for a long time after my father died my mother slept through the days and wouldn’t go out. We had breakfast at midnight and lunch at three in the morning, and dinner at the cold dim hour of 6 A. M. We went to all-night shows and went to bed at sunrise. And, for a long while, the only days we ever went out to walk were the days when it was raining and there was no sun.
The End
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Ever since last December 2019, the news out of America has been that of constant China demonization. There is nothing that China, or the Chinese could do right. That they are evil at a level unprecedented, and the only thing good about a Chinese person is if they were dead.
Ugh!
“Neocons” believe that the United States should not be ashamed to use its unrivaled power – forcefully if necessary – to promote its values around the world. Some even speak of the need to cultivate a US empire. Neoconservatives believe modern threats facing the US can no longer be reliably contained and therefore must be prevented, sometimes through preemptive military action.Most neocons believe that the US has allowed dangers to gather by not spending enough on defense and not confronting threats aggressively enough. One such threat, they contend, was Saddam Hussein and his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Since the 1991 Gulf War, neocons relentlessly advocated Mr. Hussein’s ouster.
-Neocon 101: What do Neoconservatives Believe?
Extreme?
You bet.
But that narrative is intended to drum up support for a war against China. It is immaterial if it is true or not. It just… is all part and parcel of a propaganda campaign that is needed to get Americans on a “war footing”. And make no mistake. They want another full-on World War. They want to see it [1] unify the nation against a common enemy, [2] decimate and destroy China for personal plunder, and [3] renew America as the dominant nation in the world.
Ah. There’s nothing that I can do about that. If America is going to fight another war, there’s nothing that I can do about it. I have as much power in this matter as an ant does against a stampede of rampaging elephants.
All that I can do, is duck my head. Then scurry out of the line of fire. When people ask me what I am doing and why, I point out what I am seeing, and they immediately get their shackles up! “How dare I even think such a thing!” They demand.
Fine, I say.
Bio-weapon COVID-19. The United States would NEVER…
Micro Nuke on the BRI in Lebanon. The United States would NEVER…
Arrest of industry CEOS. The United States would never…
Drones spraying swine flu to destroy Chinese Pork. The US would never…
Ordering other nations to stop trading with China. The United States would never…
Banning 5G, all Chinese phones, Chinese Apps. The USA would never…
Cut trade, communication, and travel with China. The United States would never…
What ever.
Anyways. If you cannot see what the “end game” is with all the NEOCONS in the White House, you never will. It’s pretty blatant and “in your face”.
The only question is timing.
There is a shitload of domestic issues “on the table” right now, and the China events will figure into this calculus, for better or worse. I don’t know which, honestly. After all, it is an election year.
I talked to some close friends and relatives in the USA, all rabid Trump supporters, and they pretty much told me this…
Oh, Trump will get reelected. It's a certainty.
And China. Well, the USA will hurt China really bad, and they won't be able to do anything about it, because "we hold all the cards". Trump is playing 48 D chess. He's very smart, it's just that he has a really bad habit with social media. But, disregard that. He's really, actually a genius.
Biden is such a joke. He is actually physically living inside a closet. There is no friggin' way that he'll ever become President.
It WILL be world war III, and yes, I'm aware of that. But I'm ready, and so is the United States.
I think they are all delusional.
But, I still love them anyways.
OK. Well, I came across this article on my LinkedIN feed a ways back. I thought that it was pretty good. It comes up with other things, positive things to say about China. Which pretty much makes it completely unique. How many times have you read anything positive about China in any of the American press?
I think that the world needs to look at things in a positive way.
Don’t you?
What I Love About China
Published on March 4, 2020 by Jim Nelson, President, SHI Group Recruitment. Edited to fit this venue, and all credit to the original author.
Sentiment
against China inside and out is pretty high these days. Some trends are
concerning, but much endures for me. What I love about China is quite a
bit. I am an American and have lived in China for over 20 years. I love
America and cry when we sing “I am proud to be an American, where at least I know I am free.”
However, I have found things in China that I should mention. I know these comments are generalizations and there are exceptions, but these are things I have generally found to be true. Also, many things I find here I might also have found in other developing countries. I found them here. Finally, some of these lessons may have been things this Swedish American needed to learn more than some others from the US.
What I Love About China
1. Food.
China, Italy, and Mexico are the competitors for the American stomach for a reason. China is a food culture that I love and O, do not make them late for lunch.
2. Friends.
I never knew before I moved to China that most Americans are lonely and do not even know it. What I mean is that Americans like to talk about the weather and some highlights about our kids, but we do not go much deeper.
I have an Afrikaner friend who lives in the States. He says that just when he feels the relationship is going deeper, the American will suddenly back off relationally.
Most Americans have an invisible wall that they do not recognize that no one or almost no one crosses. Remember the Simon & Garfunkel tune that says, “I am a Rock, I am an Island. I touch no one and no one touches me.”? That is America in so many ways.
We Americans do not get personal.
For example, I can talk about religious faith or how much they earn with most anyone in China whereas you cannot touch that in America or you risk losing your friend. It seems I was open to something different when I came to China and discovered that in America we did not talk deep.
I am glad to have become a deeper person here and less lonely. (Though I never knew I was lonely before I came)
3. Be part of a group.
Americans are desperately independent. Freedom has come to mean that we do not rely on anyone emotionally or otherwise. This is related to 2 it seems.
Individualism has become extreme in America. In America, I pump my own gas and never talk to a teller at the bank.
I bought a house in China and borrowed US$60,000 from my Chinese friends and not a penny from my American friends.
Friendships have traction in China.
Americans
would rather give me some money than loan any. When I first married my
Chinese wife 14 years ago, I walked around the table to get a butter
knife right behind my wife. She called me on it immediately. “Why are we
married if you do not ask for anything?”
4. Relationship ties.
Americans give free gifts. We want no tie or outstanding debt as it were.
Chinese give gifts to create and buttress their relationships.
No one talks about a free gift here. 2, 3 and 4 are related here, and I am glad to accept this new thing. I think it has made me a better person.
5. The Chinese is a deeply emotional nation.
In 2001, the American Navy sunk a Japanese fishing boat and many Japanese school students died. No government angst was aired by Japan. The Americans apologized profusely and paid all costs for the losses. The families were upset and wanted apologies and got them. No one in Japan said we did it on purpose. It was a very sad rational event actually.
In 1999, the US bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, it was all angst and blame and harsh words all across China, and no one in China even yet believes the Americans did this by accident. No students died, but three reporters did. China declared them maryters. No sense of that happened in Japan with the boat.
The Chinese people are an introverted deeply emotional people unlike the Japanese. Chinese mothers teach Tang dynasty poetry to their small children. China has a National Holiday to honor a poet who committed suicide. America honors the guy who made someone else die.
The relation between America and China is a love-hate relationship and emotional from the top government to the bottom peasant. The relationship with Japan is not love-hate. It is more like business.
I would describe the Americans as being an extroverted audacious shallow emotional country.
I would describe the Japanese as being a rational detailed private country.
The US relationship with China is invariably emotional.
Being a naturally rational person, I gained a lot from the perspective of a deeply feeling country. I learned to live in China.
6. They study history.
The Chinese are backing into the future with their eyes firmly fixed on the past. I love history and yet my countrymen had little interest. Here everything might be seen with eyes fixed on the past. Chinese when I first arrived might approach me and say “Do you love China for her 5000 years of written history?”
I have often enjoyed talking and debating history here in a land where most people still believe the South Koreans started the Korean War. Further, so hard for China to crack the habits of its past in child raising, medical thoughts and on and on.
They seem to say “Surely China could not have been wrong all these 5000 years?” They challenged me to think more about what is true and what I believe about the past.
7. Pedestrian Friendly.
I can ride a bicycle here and never need a car.
In America we must have a car as our cities are spread out and our public transportation stinks as we are desperately independent (see 3 above).
By 2013 Chinese people had stopped riding bikes, but I still do. Then out of nostalgia they started riding rental bikes but that got old fast. I still bike everywhere and love it. China is so dense that biking and walking are practical and subways and buses can fill the rest well.
8. Appreciate everything. Now.
I have learned to not take things for granted, like clean roads, and blue skies with white clouds, and clear understandable win / win relationships.
9. Happiness is an attitude. Not a place.
Happiness cannot be bought. I have seen some of the happiest faces in some of the poorest places here.
I guess I should stop. God Bless America and God Bless China, May they each learn from the other.
Conclusions
It’s a nice article. Of course it is another person’s opinion and where you live will have a lot to do with your experience. I live in Zhuhai China and every day is fresh, clean air, and blue skies. But that came with planning and strong prayer affirmation campaigns. It did not occur out of the blue.
If you are in an industrial zone, expect dirtier and grimier surroundings and a white hazy sky. It comes with the territory.
Where we live will influence your life, and your relationships.
I spent six years in Indiana, in the United States. I had a good job there, and I was making a good salary. yet, something was missing. I didn’t realize what it was until I left Indiana and moved to Mississippi, and then to Boston. It’s the people.
Boston folk are really fine open and friendly, and they might seem a bit brash and harsh, but that’s just their way of getting to know you.
Hey! You'se got a problem with that?
I am sure that Vice President Mike Pence (from Indiana) is a very nice person, but he probably doesn’t drink, he attends church regularly, and has a nice house in an upscale neighborhood. You can probably smile at him and he probably would hold the door open for you in a store, but having a deep heart-to-heart conversation with him would probably be out of the question. It’s not the Hooser way.
It’s not that, that is bad, in itself. The point is that where you live and how you associate with people is what defines the quality of our life.
Be it blue skies, fresh air, nice people that would do anything for you (including give you the shirt off their back), and cultural and social activities.
Life is what we make it.
You do not need to be constrained to live in the same area that your parents choose, nor associate with the same friends that you made in elementary school. You do not need to be stuck in a job that you chose when you were in your early 20’s, and you certainly do not need to be stuck in a relationship that is devoid of love, care, and happiness.
If the USA provides all your needs, emotional, spiritual, cultural, social and monetary, then I say there there and prosper. If that is not acceptable, then try China. And if China is not acceptable, then try another nation. Maybe Iceland. The point is that you, and you alone, define what your happiness is.
And if others don’t understand, well…
…that’s their problem.
Do you want more?
I have more posts like this in my China Index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
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The short story “The Last Night of The World” by Ray Bradbury is very calmed. Perhaps because it portrays speculation and ‘what ifs?’. It gives you an indirect complement, for it does not describe what is causing the end of the world. Only that you know that it is heading towards you and will reach you very, very soon.
Enjoy.
The Last Night of the World
By Ray Bradbury
“WHAT would you do if you knew that this was the last night of the world?” “What would I do? You mean seriously?”
“Yes, seriously.”
“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought.”
He poured some coffee. In the background the two girls were playing blocks on the parlor rug in the light of the green hurricane lamps. There was an easy, clean aroma of the brewed coffee in the evening air.
“Well, better start thinking about it,” he said. “You don’t mean it!”
“A war?”
He shook his head.
“Not the hydrogen or atom bomb?” “No.”
“Or germ warfare?”
“None of those at all,” he said, stirring his coffee slowly. “But just, let’s say, the closing of a book.” “I don’t think I understand.”
“No, nor do I, really; it’s just a feeling. Sometimes it frightens me, sometimes I’m not frightened at all but at peace.” He glanced in at the girls and their yellow hair shining in the lamplight. “I didn’t say anything to you. It first happened about four nights ago.”
“What?”
“A dream I had. I dreamed that it was all going to be over, and a voice said it was; not any kind of voice I can remember, but a voice anyway, and it said things would stop here on Earth. I didn’t think too much about it the next day, but then I went to the office and caught Stan Willis looking out the window in the middle of the afternoon, and I said a penny for your thoughts, Stan, and he said, I had a dream last night, and before he even told me the dream I knew what it was. I could have told him, but he told me and I listened to him.”
“It was the same dream?”
“The same. I told Stan I had dreamed it too. He didn’t seem surprised. He relaxed, in fact. Then we started walking through the office, for the hell of it. It wasn’t planned. We didn’t say, ‘Let’s walk around.’ We just walked on our own, and everywhere we saw people looking at their desks or their hands or out windows. I talked to a few. So did Stan.”
“And they all had dreamed?”
“All of them. The same dream, with no difference.” “Do you believe in it?”
“Yes. I’ve never been more certain.”
“And when will it stop? The world, I mean.”
“Sometime during the night for us, and then as the night goes on around the world, that’ll go too. It’ll take twenty-four hours for it all to go.”
They sat awhile not touching their coffee. Then they lifted it slowly and drank, looking at each other. “Do we deserve this?” she said.
“It’s not a matter of deserving; it’s just that things didn’t work out. I notice you didn’t even argue about this. Why not?”
“I guess I’ve a reason,” she said.
“The same one everyone at the office had?”
She nodded slowly. “I didn’t want to say anything. It happened last night. And the women on the block talked about it, among themselves, today. They dreamed. I thought it was only a coincidence.” She picked up the evening paper. “There’s nothing in the paper about it.”
“Everyone knows, so there’s no need.”
He sat back in his chair, watching her. “Are you afraid?” “No. I always thought I would be, but I’m not.”
“Where’s that spirit called self-preservation they talk so much about?”
“I don’t know. You don’t get too excited when you feel things are logical. This is logical. Nothing else but this could have happened from the way we’ve lived.”
“We haven’t been too bad, have we?”
“No, nor enormously good. I suppose that’s the trouble—we haven’t been very much of anything except us, while a big part of the world was busy being lots of quite awful things.”
The girls were laughing in the parlor.
“I always thought people would be screaming in the streets at a time like this.” “I guess not. You don’t scream about the real thing.”
“Do you know, I won’t miss anything but you and the girls. I never liked cities or my work or anything except you three. I won’t miss a thing except perhaps the change in the weather, and a glass of ice water when it’s hot, and I might miss sleeping. How can we sit here and talk this way?”
“Because there’s nothing else to do.”
“That’s it, of course; for if there were, we’d be doing it. I suppose this is the first time in the history of the world that everyone has known just what they were going to do during the night.”
“I wonder what everyone else will do now, this evening, for the next few hours.”
“Go to a show, listen to the radio, watch television, play cards, put the children to bed, go to bed themselves, like always.”
“In a way that’s something to be proud of—like always.”
They sat a moment and then he poured himself another coffee. “Why do you suppose it’s tonight?”
“Because.”
“Why not some other night in the last century, or five centuries ago, or ten?”
“Maybe it’s because it was never October 19, 1969, ever before in history, and now it is and that’s it; because this date means more than any other date ever meant; because it’s the year when things are as they are all over the world and that’s why it’s the end.”
“There are bombers on their schedules both ways across the ocean tonight that’ll never see land.” “That’s part of the reason why.”
“Well,” he said, getting up, “what shall it be? Wash the dishes?”
They washed the dishes and stacked them away with special neatness. At eight-thirty the girls were put to bed and kissed good night and the little lights by their beds turned on and the door left open just a trifle.
“I wonder,” said the husband, coming from the bedroom and glancing back, standing there with his pipe for a moment.
“What?”
“If the door will be shut all the way, or if it’ll be left just a little ajar so some light comes in.” “I wonder if the children know.”
“No, of course not.”
They sat and read the papers and talked and listened to some radio music and then sat together by the fireplace watching the charcoal embers as the clock struck ten-thirty and eleven and eleven-thirty. They thought of all the other people in the world who had spent their evening, each in his own special way.
“Well,” he said at last.
He kissed his wife for a long time.
“We’ve been good for each other, anyway.” “Do you want to cry?” he asked.
“I don’t think so.”
They moved through the house and turned out the lights and went into the bedroom and stood in the night cool darkness undressing and pushing back the covers. “The sheets are so clean and nice.”
“I’m tired.” “We’reall tired.”
They got into bed and lay back. “Just a moment,” she said.
He heard her get out of bed and go into the kitchen. A moment later, she returned. “I left the water running in the sink,” she said.
Something about this was so very funny that he had to laugh. She laughed with him, knowing what it was that she had done that was funny. They stopped laughing at last and lay in their cool night bed, their hands clasped, their heads together.
“Good night,” he said, after a moment. “Good night,” she said.
The End
Do you want more?
I have more stories like this in my fictional index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
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I haven't been posting too many "extraterrestrial" things lately. But, I've got some followers that live for this kind of stuff. So, in the interests of balance, I'm gonna post this article. And it will most probably anger the rest of my readership in the process.
Ahem…
Here goes…
If you were to have an ongoing conversation with an extraterrestrial, and ask them what they thought about the human race, and the human species, what would they say? What do you think they would say?
Well, here I am going to tell you.
Well, actually, I’m going to tell you (in my way) what one particular species thinks, anyways. I just can’ speak for every species. Just those with whom I’m exposed to.
So…
Is it our culture? Is it our society? It is out spirituality? Is it our technology? Is it our attractiveness? It is our various religions? Is it our adaptability? Is it our kindness? What is it?
Nope.
None of the above.
It is our “human-ness”.
What?
There are many species out in our universe (though I am only referring to those in our immediate vincinity) and they all have their own societies, and their own technologies, and their own histories, and all of that. What makes the human species “special” is our unique “human-ness”.
What is “human-ness”?
A trait.
It’s a trait that is very difficult to put into words because it is a comparative measure. It is not something that is recognized by us as having. It’s something you see and appreciate when you compare humans to other species. We don’t know it exists because we can’t see it.
We are it.
If you compare species A, to species B, to species C, and then to humans, you will not help but to be amazed at our “human-ness”.
Well…
Maybe “amazed” is not the right word. Perhaps a better one woould be “pleased”, or “pleasantly amused”, or “comforted”.
Human-ness
Now I am going to upset some people, but do not shoot the messenger. OK?
Don’t shoot the messenger is an admonition to not blame the bearer of bad news. It is often used when someone reveals a difficult truth that the listener does not want to hear. It reminds the listener that the truth is not the fault of the person revealing the truth.
-grammarist.com
The best example that I know of that highlights and showcases our “human-ness” is the various shades of Japanese culture and society. I know this because of <redacted>.
And it occured to me that perhaps there are others who might want to know about what makes humans so “unique”.
Well, we are sort-of unique, because <redacted>.
It has been “thrown into my face” on numerous occasions by <redacted> that the Japanese have some really inherent attributes that highlight the human species. And while most of the world might think that the Japanese are bonkers crazy, they are not viewed as such by non-humans.
They are instead viewed as sublime.
Sublime;
"of such excellence, grandeur, or beauty as to inspire great admiration or awe."
In fact, the Japanese are probably (I am not too far out of line here) the most approachable culture of humans because of their saturation of human-ness qualities. This has been impressed to me numerous times, and on different occasions.
The Japanese culture and socity is infused with “human-ness”.
I know that it is going to upset many people, but Americans are not high on the list of being appreciated or even understood by the extraterrestrials that I know of.
The Japanese are.
And while you might snort, and laugh, you all have to realize that there are many things that we humans have but do not appreciate or understand. The Japanese culture and society highlights these characteristics and enlarges them. And, well… “showcases” our “human-ness”
A descriptive video
The following is a video that (I personally believe) is filled with examples of what “human-ness” is and now it is used. The group is “World Order”, and the song is “have a nice day”.
I could have picked out any number of other videos.
I chose this one because it seems to have the widest range of “human-ness” related events that I have found. (I am sure that there are better candidates, but I don’t have all day, don’t you know.)
And yeah. I know.
It’s bat-shit, off the wall, bonkers nuts.
But, it displays our “human-ness”.
Here is a few embeds of Videos of world order have a nice day. I hope that they are able to play. I have put a few embeds as I don't know which one will work in your region.
Try YouTube first…
You tube
If you cannot access the embed on YouTube, then try metatube…
Well, it’s sort of like that. When we watch cat videos we are admiring the cats being feline in all it’s glory. Well, it’s sort of like that. You might go as far as to say that the <redacted> like to watch Japanese Music Videos to enjoy our human-ness…
…except they do something different. But it’s like that. It really is.
Instead of videos, of course, they <redacted>.
The attributes
In the above video is at least 35 scenes or elements of “human-ness”. Can you identify what they are? Can you see why they would be appreciated by another species?
Or maybe you can’t.
If you think that the Japanese are too off the wall, and not “with the program” then I am not making myself clear. The qualities that make us human; our human-ness is our relationships with others and how we interface with the universe within our reality.
Watch the video again, if you still “don’t get it”.
Pay attention to the interactions between the individuals, both singular and in groups. Note the interaction of the groups of people with things and items. These characteristics define our human-ness.
Like anything… it is our relationships with others, and our actions and thoughts that define our sentience. That is what makes us attractive.
Do you want some more?
I have more posts about extraterrestrials in my extraterrestrial index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
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This post is a selection of artworks by artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema. In his life, he produced at least 362 artworks. In the art world, he is classified as a “Netherlands Victorian Neoclassical, Olympian Classical Revivalist painter and draftsman”. He was born 1/8/1836 and died 6/28/1912. His works are awesome.
There is no other way to say this. His works, each and every single one of them, are masterpieces. These little tiny pictures just do not do them justice. You need to go and see the HD version and look at the details close up.
He is stunning and his works are wonderful. It has been said by “art experts” that they are “cold, sterile, and obsolete” and not deserving presentation in a museum. But I disagree with that perception. I find them intriguing, worthy of contemplation, and physically beautiful. I had the opportunity to see of his his works up from and close, and the level of detail astounded me.
Here is only a small tiny overview of some of my favorites. Since he painted in enormous canvases, the level of observed detail here is just pitiful. You all should see his works up close and in all it’s amazing and glorious detail.
Rather than discuss the emotions garnered by the expressions on the canvasses of James Jacques Joseph Tissot, instead I will emphasize the period histories behind the works. Here, once you know the history behind the illustrations of the art, will you really start to see and understand the 5-D beautify and complexity of the work.
You can go ahead and see all of his works at the Art Renewal Center here.
Elagabalus or Heliogabalus was the emperor of Rome from 218 to 222. Though his reign was a very short one, he is remembered in history for being one of the most eccentric and vulgar emperors of all time. He was related to the imperial Severan dynasty of Rome through his mother.
-Elagabalus Biography
Lust, Gluttony, and Sloth. Three of the Seven Deadly Sins are depicted in Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s The Roses of Heliogabalus.
Many other sins are depicted alongside these cardinal vices making this an extremely wicked painting.
Ah…
But what’s the story about all the flowers and the flower petals?
Listen up.
While the late Victorian world was morally prudish and clad in dark velvets, late Victorian paintings were often morally bankrupt and clad in light silks. Academic paintings were all the rage, and they frequently used juicy historical anecdotes for the basis of their subjects.
The Roses of Heliogabalus is no exception.
This painting depicts an infamous party scene hosted by Emperor Heliogabalus.
The Roman emperor lays nonchalantly, drinks his wine, and observes as his guests below are smothered to death by rose petals. This is the ultimate party prank. This is the ultimate Roman death.
What?
Death by flower petals!
Yes. That is exactly what happened.
The Roman emperor, after a day / night of eating, drinking and orgies had all the attendees die through suffocation of tiny flower petals.
No. I am not kidding.
…
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema painted The Roses of Heliogabalus in 1888 when the British Empire was at its peak of power and influence. The Victorians were the undisputed rulers of one-fourth of the world’s land, and the phrase, “The sun never sets on the British Empire,” was penned to describe such a global domain that practically had territories in every time zone.
The British were proud of their international power, uniting vast regions under the British flag.
Because of their vast dominion and unrivaled prosperity, the Victorians viewed themselves as the inheritors of the former Roman Empire. They believed they brought civilization to the uncivilized, manners to the unmannered, and morality to the immoral.
Therefore, with a joyful backward glance, the Victorians reflected on Roman Imperial history with its peaks…
And with it’s pitfalls…
Emperor Heliogabalus was definitely a pitfall worthy of note.
Heliogabalus was a Roman Emperor who ruled from 218 to 222. In his short four-year reign he scarred Roman society and the annals of world history with his extremely debauched lifestyle.
Frequent scandals surrounded Heliogabalus due to his decadent lifestyle and his transgressions against sexual and religious norms.
He was an extremely unpopular emperor, and he eventually alienated everyone supporting his regime. His lifestyle must have been that ridiculously unacceptable because, after only four years of ruling, Emperor Heliogabalus was assassinated by his family, including his very own grandmother!
In The Roses of Heliogabalus, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema depicts one of the most infamous moments in the life of Emperor Heliogabalus.
…
It is recorded in the Historia Augusta that Heliogabalus invited guests to his palace one evening to partake in his drinking party and orgy.
After several hours of drinking heaving wine and swapping sexual partners, his guests were hopelessly intoxicated and tired. They lounged listlessly around the room. While they were so delightfully glowing from the heavy drinking and amusing entertainment, the ceiling above them opened and flutterings of flower petals began to fall.
At first, the gentle wafting of petals added to the dream-like prettiness of the party. It perfumed the atmosphere with a slight floral scent. It heightened the senses and added pleasure to the moment.
More petals fell, and more, and more. The petals became a cascade of flowers. More flowers fell, and more descended upon the sleepy guests. A waterfall of petals erupted upon the helpless guests.
They were showered, covered, and blanketed.
Puddles formed into lakes that formed into oceans of petals. Hills had become petal mountains, and the guests were smothered under the endlessly growing sea of flowers.
They breathed… in the tiny petals…
…and they choked…
… gasping for air.
The tiny petals entered their lungs, and they died covered in floral glory.
The quickening smell of death was masked by the smell of flowers.
Floral perfume wafted from the human-infused mountains of flowers. Emperor Heliogabalus was amused by the floral carnage and continued to drink his wine.
Death was tonight’s real entertainment.
According to the original source, Historia Augusta, Emperor Heliogabalus used violets and other flowers to suffocate his dinner guests.
However, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema uses roses as his method of death.
During the late Victorian era, when Alma-Tadema painted The Roses of Heliogabalus, roses represented lust and desire in the Victorian language of flowers known as floriography.
In simple terms, floriography is the language of flowers. The language is spoken by selecting specific flower types with associated meanings to communicate feelings or wishes. Artists too have used floriography to communicate deeper messages in their work. Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904), Victorian Vase with Flowers of Devotion.
-Floriography: The Secret Language of Victorian Florals
Roses were a more appropriate flower for Alma-Tadema to paint because violets represented faithfulness and modesty in the Victorian floriography.
Emperor Heliogabalus was many things, but he was certainly not faithful and modest. Therefore Alma-Tadema smothers the guests of Heliogabalus in roses and not violets, and adds a contemporary meaning his audience would have recognized.
When Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema displayed The Roses of Heliogabalus in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1888, it was warmly received by the public.
The public appreciated classical-inspired scenes especially if a moral story could be interpreted.
Remember, this is the Victorian era, and unpunished vice would not be tolerated!
The public easily interpreted Alma-Tadema’s symbolism and message: as the guests’ lust was smothered by the lustful rose, so does lust smother the virtuous soul. A contemporary message was conveyed using an ancient anecdote.
A contemporary message could command a contemporary price. When Sir John Aird, 1st Baronet, commissioned Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema to paint The Roses of Heliogabalus, he paid Alma-Tadema 4,000 GBP.
The price of 4,000 GBP in 1888 would approximately be 150,000 USD in 2020.
Alma-Tadema was an appreciated artist in his time, and the price reflects the four months it took Alma-Tadema to create this great work.
What is sad is that shortly after Alma-Tadema’s death in 1912, his works and the Academic Style quickly fell out of favor with the public.
The social changes brought by WWI, the 1920s, and the Great Depression culminated in his works being quickly forgotten and ignored. It was not until the 1960s that his works and the Academic Style began to be reevaluated for their stylistic majesty and clarity.
The Academic Style is still being reevaluated today, and while it is not as popular as other styles of the same timeframe like Pre-Raphaelites, Impressionism, and Arts & Crafts, the Academic Style has its own masterpieces like Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s The Roses of Heliogabalus.
It brings to life a moment from one of Rome’s most hated and reviled emperors.
It brings ancient history to a contemporary audience.
It makes it both entertaining and educational.
Who knew that a Roman Emperor literally smothered his dinner guests with flowers?
We have Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema to thank for capturing that humorous anecdote to enliven our next dinner party. The Roses of Heliogabalus is a history lesson on canvas. It is the ultimate party prank. It is the ultimate Roman death.
Regarded by the Romans as “fatale monstrum”- a fatal omen, Cleopatra is one of the ancient world’s most popular, though elusive figures.
The pregnant phrase fatale monstrum comes at a crucial point in the third and longest of the three sentences of the ‘Cleopatra Ode’. Before it Cleopatra is being hissed from the stage of history with cries of disapproval; after it she is recalled to receive plaudit after plaudit for her courage and resolution.
-Cleopatra as Fatale Monstrum (Horace, Carm. 1. 37. 21 ...
The Egyptian Queen has been immortalized by numerous writers and film-makers, most popularly by Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra, and by Hollywood in Cleopatra (1963) starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
The latter work features the memorable image of the enticing young Cleopatra emerging gracefully from an unfurled carpet in front of Roman general Julius Caesar.
But is Cleopatra to be regarded merely as the lover of JuliusCaesar and Mark Antony? Or did she play an important role not only in the history of Egypt, but also in that of the mighty Roman Republic?
Cleopatra VII Philopator ('father-loving') was born in January 69 BCE in the city of Alexandria, Egypt, the daughter of Ptolemy XII Auletes (117 BCE –51 BCE) and possibly Cleopatra V Tryphaena (c. 95 BCE – c. 57 BCE).
Cleopatra was to become the last monarch of the Ptolemaic Empire (established in 323 BCE after the death of Alexander the Great), ruling Egypt from 51 BCE to 30 BCE.
In 48 BCE Cleopatra had become an ally and lover of Julius Caesar and remained so until his assassination in Rome in March of 44 BCE.
The death of Caesar threw Rome into turmoil, with various factions competing for control, the most important of these being the armies of Mark Antony (83 BCE– 30 BCE) and Octavian (63 BCE – 14 CE), the former a supporter and loyal friend Caesar, the latter his adopted son.
In 41 BC Cleopatra was summoned to Tarsus (in modern southern Turkey) by Mark Antony. She is said to have entered the city by sailing up the Cydnus River in a decorated barge. It was a barge with purple sails, all the time while dressed in the robes of the Greek goddess Aphrodite.
Antony, who equated himself with the god Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, was instantly won over.
Much like the meeting between Cleopatra and Caesar, both sides saw something in the other which they needed. For Cleopatra it was another opportunity to achieve power both in Egypt and in Rome, for Anthony the support of Rome’s largest and wealthiest client states in his campaign against the might of the Parthians (Parthia was a region in modern north-eastern Iran) was highly desirable.
At the meeting Cleopatra allegedly requested that her half-sister Arsinoë, living in protection at the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, be executed to prevent any future attempts on her throne.
Anthony and Cleopatra soon became allies and lovers and he returned with her to Alexandria in 40 BCE.
In Alexandria Cleopatra and Antony formed a society of “inimitable livers”, which some historians have interpreted as an excuse to lead a life of debauchery, though it was more likely to have been a group dedicated to the cult of the mystical god Dionysus.
In that year Cleopatra bore Antony the twins Alexander Helios (the Sun) and Cleopatra Selene (the Moon).
The political situation in Rome compelled Antony to return to Italy where he was forced to conclude a temporary settlement with Octavian, part of which was that he married Octavian’s sister, Octavia.
It was to be three years before he and Cleopatra were to meet again, at the city of Antioch (near the modern Turkey / Syria border) under the shadow of the Octavian’s growing military power in the West.
One result of this meeting was that Cleopatra became pregnant with her third child by Antony (the future Ptolemy Philadelphus); another was that parts of Rome’s eastern possessions came under Cleopatra’s control.
Celebrations in Alexandria
In 34 BCE, despite the fact that Antony’s Parthian campaign had been an extravagant failure, Antony and Cleopatra celebrated a mock Roman Triumph in the streets of Alexandria.
Crowds flocked to the Gymnasium to see the couple seated on golden thrones surrounded by their children, and Antony made a proclamation known today as the ‘Donations of Alexandria’. In this declaration Antony distributed lands held by Rome and Parthia amongst Cleopatra and their children, and proclaimed Caesarion as Caesar’s legitimate son.
Not surprisingly, the ‘Donations of Alexandria’ caused outrage in Rome, where the rumour began to spread that Antony intended to transfer the empire’s capital from Rome to Alexandria.
In 32 BCE, Octavian had the Senate deprive Antony of his powers and declare war against Cleopatra, calling her a whore and a drunken Oriental.
To avoid another civil war, Antony was not mentioned in the declaration, but this was to no avail and Antony decided to join the war on Cleopatra’s side.
The culmination of the war came at the naval Battle of Actium, which took place near the town of Preveza in northwestern Greece, on September 2, 31 BCE.
Here Mark Antony and Cleopatra’s combined force of 230 vessels and 50,000 sailors were defeated by Octavian’s navy commanded by Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, effectively handing control of the Roman world over to Octavian.
In 30 BCE Octavian invaded Egypt and laid siege to Alexandria. Hopelessly outnumbered, Anthony’s forces surrendered and, in the honourable Roman tradition, Antony committed suicide by falling on his sword.
The Death of Cleopatra
After Antony’s death Cleopatra’s was taken to Octavian who informed her that she would be brought to Rome and paraded in the streets as part of his Triumph. Perhaps unable to bear the thought of this humiliation, on August 12, 30 BCE Cleopatra dressed in her royal robes and lay upon a golden couch with a diadem on her brow.
According to tradition (found in ancient historian Plutarch, for example) she had an asp (an Egyptian cobra), brought to her concealed in a basket of figs, and died from the bite.
Two of her female servants also died with her.
The asp was a symbol of divine royalty to the Egyptians, so by allowing the asp to bite her, Cleopatra became immortal.
Other historians (including Joyce Tyldesley) believe that Cleopatra used either a poisonous ointment or a vial of poison to commit suicide.
Cleopatra had lived thirty nine years, for twenty-two of which she had reigned as queen, and for fourteen she had been Antony’s partner in his empire.
After her death her son Caesarion was declared pharaoh, but he was soon executed on Octavian’s orders. Her other children were sent to Rome to be raised by Antony’s wife, Octavia.
Cleopatra represented the last significant threat to Roman authority and her death also marks the end of the Ptolemaic Kingdom.
The vast treasures of Egypt were plundered by Octavian, and Egypt itself became a new Roman province. Within a few years the Senate named Octavian Augustusand he became the first Roman Emperor, consolidating the western and eastern halves of the Republic into a Roman Empire.
Octavian later published his biography in which he stripped Cleopatra of her political ability and portrayed her as an immoral foreigner, a temptress of upright Roman men.
A number of Roman historians and writers (the poets Horace and Lucan for example) reinforced the image of Cleopatra Empire an incestuous, adulterous whore who used sex to try and emasculate the Roman Empire.
Unfortunately, such Roman propaganda has had a profound influence on the image of Cleopatra that has been passed down into Western culture.
The real Cleopatra was highly skilled politically (though ruthless with her enemies), popular with her subjects, spoke seven languages, and was said to be the only Ptolemy to read and speak Egyptian.
It is also a sobering thought to remember how different the history of western civilization might have been if Cleopatra had managed to create an eastern empire to rival the increasing might of Rome, which she very nearly succeeded in doing.
Recent archaeological work has cast some interesting but controversial light on the possible location of Cleopatra’s tomb.
Greco-Roman historian Plutarch wrote that that Antony and Cleopatra were buried together. Then, in 2008 CE archaeologists from the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities and from the Dominican Republic, working at the Temple of Taposiris Magna, 28 miles west of Alexandria, reported that one of the chambers in the building probably contained the bodies of Cleopatra and Mark Antony.
The team have so far discovered 22 bronze coins inscribed with Cleopatra’s name and bearing her image, a bust of Cleopatra, and an alabaster mask believed to represent Mark Antony. Work at the site is ongoing, and only time will tell if the archaeologist are correct in their theory that the great couple were interred at such a distance from Alexandria.
Other works
You can see that the amount of artistic skill, creativity and history that goes into each of these paintings are not something that you can devote a one or two SEO friendly paragraph to. Art, real serious art, is about humans and our humanity. And when we see these spectacular images, we should also be advised o the history behind the images.
Or you can check out “modern art”. It is SEO friendly and doesn’t need explanation for discussion. Like this multi-million dollar piece…
If you want SEO friendly art, you can check out these links…
Don’t get too hot and bothered about it. It’s a way that the ultra-rich can avoid government oversight in large money transfers. They assign a value to a “piece of art” and hand the money to the “artist”. He then gives a sizable portion back (a kick back scheme) and volia(!) money suddenly goes “off the books”.
Most nations are unable to tax, track and regulate works of art. So the very wealthy use it as a mechanism to “launder money” legally.
May 19, 2017 · I wake up in cold sweats because of that god damn stupid blue painting being sold for 44 million dollars. It’s garbage. It’s idiotic. It’s nothing better than a starvin Marvin could do with his toes with his last dying breath. But some asshole decided it’s “art” so it’s worth 44 million dollars. Fuck youuuuuuuuuuuu.
-Nothing Triggers Me As Much As God Damn Stupid Prices …
Colosseum, also called Flavian Amphitheatre, giant amphitheatre built in Rome under the Flavian emperors. Construction of the Colosseum was begun sometime between 70 and 72 ce during the reign of Vespasian. It is located just east of the Palatine Hill, on the grounds of what was Nero’s Golden House.
The artificial lake that was the centrepiece of that palace complex was drained, and the Colosseum was sited there, a decision that was as much symbolic as it was practical. Vespasian, whose path to the throne had relatively humble beginnings, chose to replace the tyrannical emperor’s private lake with a public amphitheatre that could host tens of thousands of Romans.
The structure was officially dedicated in 80 ce by Titus in a ceremony that included 100 days of games.
Later, in 82 ce, Domitian completed the work by adding the uppermost story.
Unlike earlier amphitheatres, which were nearly all dug into convenient hillsides for extra support, the Colosseum is a freestanding structure of stone and concrete, using a complex system of barrel vaults and groin vaults and measuring 620 by 513 feet (189 by 156 metres) overall.
Three of the arena’s stories are encircled by arcades framed on the exterior by engaged columns in the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders; the structure’s rising arrangement of columns became the basis of the Renaissance codification known as the assemblage of orders.
The main structural framework and facade are travertine, the secondary walls are volcanic tufa, and the inner bowl and the arcade vaults are concrete.
The amphitheatre seated some 50,000 spectators, who were shielded from the sun by a massive retractable velarium (awning).
Supporting masts extended from corbels built into the Colosseum’s top, or attic, story, and hundreds of Roman sailors were required to manipulate the rigging that extended and retracted the velarium.
The Colosseum was the scene of thousands of hand-to-hand combats between gladiators, of contests between men and animals, and of many larger combats, including mock naval engagements. However, it is uncertain whether the arena was the site of the martyrdom of early Christians.
Bacchus was a Roman agricultural god who was associated with the harvest — particularly that of grapevines. The son of Jupiter by a human woman, Bacchus was said to wander the world educating people about the delightful wines that could be made from grapes.
The word bacchanalia comes from Bacchus, and the wild parties thrown in his honor.
According to legend, Bacchus traveled the earth teaching people how to make wine, and is credited with spreading grapevine cuttings around the world.
Secret rituals for women only were held in Bacchus' honor during the ancient Roman period.
Much like his Greek counterpart Dionysus, Bacchus earned the title of party god. In fact, a drunken orgy is still called a bacchanalia, and for good reason. Devotees of Bacchus whipped themselves into a frenzy of intoxication, and in the spring Roman women attended secret ceremonies in his name.
Bacchus was associated with fertility, wine and grapes, as well as sexual free-for-alls. Although Bacchus is often linked with Beltane and the greening of spring, because of his connection to wine and grapes he is also a deity of the harvest. A celebration is held in his honor each year at the beginning of October.
Bacchus is often portrayed crowed with vines or ivy. His chariot is drawn by lions, and he is followed by a group of nubile, frenzied priestesses known as Bacchae. Sacrifices to Bacchus included the goat and the swine, because both of these animals are destructive to the annual grape harvest — without grapes, there can be no wine.
Bacchus has a divine mission, and that is his role of liberator. During his drunken frenzies, Bacchus loosens the tongues of those who partake of wine and other beverages, and allows people the freedom to say and do what they wish.
In mid-March, secret rituals were held on Rome’s Aventine hill to worship him. These rites were attended by women only, and were part of a mystery religion built up around Bacchus.
In addition to being the patron of wine and drink, Bacchus is a god of the theatrical arts. In his earlier incarnation as the Greek Dionysus, he had a theater named for him in Athens. He is often portrayed as a slightly effeminate figure, prone to good humor and general bawdiness.
This painting was inspired by an historical event recorded by Plutarch, a Greek historian, biographer and essayist. This painting shows the morning after a celebration of Bacchus/Dionysus, the God of wine and ritual madness.
This celebration caused a group of women to wander into the city of Amphissa from Phocis.
Despite these two cities being at war, the women of Amphissa allowed the women from Phocis to fall asleep in their marketplace and stood guard throughout the night to ensure the men of the city caused them no harm.
As seen in this painting, the women of Amphissa also provided them with food and care the next morning.
While The Women of Amphissa is both ethereal and dream-like, it is also very realistic as the details created by Alma-Tadema make the painting come to life. From the hair and clothing of the women, to the flowers and sculptures in the wall, the details create the beauty of this painting.
Alma-Tadema also uses a lot of white and varying shades likely representative of the peace between these groups. It is reported that Alma-Tadema used his second wife, Laura, as a model for this painting.
Many interpret this painting as a lesson in charity and humanity for the Victorian people of Alma-Tadema’s time as this was an era with lots of poverty, child labour and morality standards. It has also come to represent the strength of femininity and the importance of protection because the women of the city would have stood up to soldiers if necessary.
After his death in 1912, Alma-Tadema’s work was held in low esteem by the public despite his success during his life.
In the 1960s, however, his body of work was re-examined and deemed very significant for art history and in particular English art of the nineteenth century. Today, The Women of Amphissa is part of the private collection of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.
Moses, Hebrew Moshe, (flourished 14th–13th century bce), Hebrew prophet, teacher, and leader who, in the 13th century bce (before the Common Era, or bc), delivered his people from Egyptian slavery. In the Covenant ceremony at Mt. Sinai, where the Ten Commandments were promulgated, he founded the religious community known as Israel. As the interpreter of these Covenant stipulations, he was the organizer of the community’s religious and civil traditions. In the Judaic tradition, he is revered as the greatest prophet and teacher, and Judaism has sometimes loosely been called Mosaism, or the Mosaic faith, in Western Christendom. His influence continues to be felt in the religious life, moral concerns, and social ethics of Western civilization, and therein lies his undying significance.
-Moses | Story, Summary, Significance, & Facts | Britannica
According to the biblical account, Moses’ parents were from the tribe of Levi, one of the groups in Egypt called Hebrews. Originally the term Hebrew had nothing to do with race or ethnic origin. It derived from Habiru, a variant spelling of Ḫapiru (Apiru), a designation of a class of people who made their living by hiring themselves out for various services.
The biblical Hebrews had been in Egypt for generations, but apparently they became a threat, so one of the pharaohs enslaved them.
Unfortunately, the personal name of the king is not given, and scholars have disagreed as to his identity and, hence, as to the date of the events of the narrative of Moses.
One of the measures taken by the Egyptians to restrict the growth of the Hebrews was to order the death of all newborn Hebrew males. According to tradition, Moses’ parents, Amram and Jochebed (whose other children were Aaron and Miriam), hid him for three months and then set him afloat on the Nile in a reed basket daubed with pitch.
The child, found by the pharaoh’s daughter while bathing, was reared in the Egyptian court.
While many doubt the authenticity of this tradition, the name Moses (Hebrew Moshe) is derived from Egyptian mose (“is born”) and is found in such names as Thutmose ([The God] Thoth Is Born).
Originally, it is inferred, Moses’ name was longer, but the deity’s name was dropped. This could have happened when Moses returned to his people or possibly even earlier, because the shortened form Mose was very popular at that time.
Moses’ years in the court are passed over in silence, but it is evident from his accomplishments later that he had instruction in religious, civil, and military matters.
Since Egypt controlled Canaan (Palestine) and part of Syria and had contacts with other nations of the Fertile Crescent, Moses undoubtedly had general knowledge of life in the ancient Near East. During his education he learned somehow that he was a Hebrew, and his sense of concern and curiosity impelled him to visit his people.
According to the biblical narrative, Moses lived 120 years and was 80 when he confronted Pharaoh, but there is no indication how old he was when he went to see the Hebrews. Later Jewish and Christian tradition assumed 40-year periods for his stay in the Egyptian court, his sojourn in Midian, and his wilderness wanderings.
Most likely Moses was about 25 when he took the inspection tour among his people. There he saw the oppressive measures under which they laboured. When he found an Egyptian taskmaster beating a Hebrew, probably to death, he could control his sense of justice no longer. After checking to make sure that no one was in sight, he killed the tough Egyptian overlord.
As a prince in the court, Moses was probably in excellent physical condition, and apparently he knew the latest methods of combat.
The flush of victory pulled Moses back the next day. …
The Parthenon frieze, which runs on a continuous line around the exterior wall of the cella, is 1 meter high and 160 meters long. The sculptures are executed in low relief and depict the people of Athens in two processions that begin at the southwest corner and parade in opposite directions until they converge over the door of the cella at the east end of the Parthenon. Almost certainly it represents the Panathenaic procession that was a central celebration in Athens during Classical times.
-The Parthenon Frieze - Ancient Greece
The full title of this startling painting is Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to His Friends, and it was painted by Lawrence Alma-Tadema in 1868. You can’t get much more Classical than this for inspiration.
In the painting, which takes place sometime in the 5th century BCE, the famous ancient Greek sculptor Phidias (ca. 480-430 BCE), the man in the dark robes at center, shows off the magnificent creation he’s made for Athens’s famous temple, the Parthenon.
The friends, obviously well-to-do citizens of Athens, admire his handiwork.
The frieze of the Parthenon is a long series of sculpted bas-reliefs, chiseled from marble, that adorned the top of the Parthenon beneath the eaves. The frieze, evidently depicting a ceremonial procession of the Athenians, was/is one of the great works of art of classical Greece.
Historians are unsure whether it was carved in place, or carved previously and somehow hoisted up toward the roof. The majority of the frieze was removed from the Parthenon about 1800 and now resides in the British Museum in London, where Alma-Tadema saw it. (I saw it there too in the year 2000).
Phidias was an Athenian sculptor, the son of Charmides, and is generally acknowledged as the greatest ancient Greek sculptor and instigator of the classical style of the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Although few facts are known about his life, it is believed he lived from around 490 until 430 BC. No originals of his work exist, but his recognition as a renowned sculptor has been guaranteed due to the praise of ancient writers, as well as the influence his sculptures had on the development of the art. He gained most of his fame for his two enormous chryselephantine (gold and ivory) sculptures: One of Athena in the Parthenon, and the other of Zeus at Olympia. These statues had such a profound impact that they determined all subsequent conceptions of Athena and Zeus.
-Ancient Greece
This wonderful painting combines the best of 19th century Classical-themed art with a sort of romantic-tinged realism. The figures do appear realistic, though stylized in a way most of us would conceive of ancient Greece, looking back on it from several thousand years.
Note, however, the hairstyles on Phidias and the man on the far left, and Phidias’s beard curls. The tight kinky hair, a bit too perfect to look natural, is the way hair was often portrayed in ancient Greek art. The colors here are warm and rich, almost evocative of 19th century gaslight. I absolutely love paintings like this, for they bring to life the classical world in a very vivid and eye-catching way.
The sculpted marble depicts the Olympian gods seated while the citizens on Athens carved in low relief move stoically in the procession towards the central point around a scene depicting the folding of the peplos. The peplos was a central item in the Panathenaea and was woven by the virgins dedicated to the goddess Athena exclusively for use during the procession.
A large number of cavalry dominates the west end of the frieze, while a host of elders, musicians and people escorting sacrificial animals, fill the spaces towards the east end. The frieze over the door places the “peplos scene” at the center, while gods, and heroes, and women flank it on both sides. The gods are seated, making them twice as large as the rest of the figures who are standing or riding, and they appear in the typical realistic mortal form we are accustomed to seeing in Classical art.
The inclusion of a continuous Ionic freeze is not exclusive to the Doric Parthenon. What is unique however is the depiction of mere mortals as the subject in the decoration of a temple in Ancient Greece. If we accept that the frieze depicts the Panathenaic procession we are confronted with the fact that the line between the divine and the human has been deliberately blurred not only through the formal aesthetic conventions as with other sculptures, but via an intentional thematic narrative that places the gods among the mortals or the humans among the divine. Perhaps in the Parthenon frieze we finally glimpse the definitive formulation of Greek thought into concrete iconography: the natural world and the human being as a divine entity worthy of exploration and immortality through the arts.
In ancient times all the sculptures as well as the buildings were vividly painted and were complemented with metal attachments in the form of spears, swords, horse reins and other appropriate accessories. The result must have been a dazzling, (if not gaudy) array of three dimensional paintings, with a much different visual interpretation than the one we derive today trough the “sterilized” museum exhibits of white stone at eye level.
-The Parthenon Frieze - Ancient Greece
The painter, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, was obviously a brilliant artist, and he seems to have been an interesting person. He was born in Holland but moved to Britain in 1870 when the Franco-Prussian War broke out. A gregarious extrovert, he is said to have loved parties, wine and women. There’s a touch of melancholy about him; widowed twice, Alma-Tadema was thrown into deep depressions after the deaths of his two wives, Pauline in 1869 and Laura in 1909. Alma-Tadema died in Germany in 1912, and is buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Art like this makes life worth living. Kudos to Lawrence Alma-Tadema. As I say often, I could run Metallicman for decades on nothing but Historic Paintings posts!
Spring is an 1894 oil painting by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, currently in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California . Spring depicts the festival of Cerealia in a Roman street. One of Tadema's most famous and popular works, it took him four years to complete.
-Spring (painting) - Wikipedia
This is an enormous work. The painting is like two stories high and so filled with detail that it boggles the mind. To really appreciate it, you need to look at the various sections of it in detail.
Here is a small section…
Alma Tadema finished painting “Spring” in 1894. The subject is the celebration parade marking the return of spring.
He had worked on it for four years, making at least one major alteration. It is a tall narrow painting, 178.4 × 80.3 cm, painted in oil on canvas, and also its original, hefty, classic-style frame was designed by the artist. The painting was first put on display at the Royal Academy in 1895 and enjoyed great success. The picture’s popularity continued over the next few years with prints very much in demand.
After a memorial exhibition in 1913, the painting disappeared from the art scene, and it was not until 1970 that it made a comeback. It joined the collection of a certain Mr. Funt, an American TV personality/art collector, and it was subsequently purchased at auction by the Getty Museum in 1972. It was thought at the time to represent the realities of ancient Rome and it took pride of place in the Getty “Roman Villa” in 1974. The apparent authentic “Romanism” of the painting had even inspired certain scenes in Cecil B. De Mille’s Hollywood production of “Cleopatra” of 1934. However, further research into the painting’s subject and significance suggests it is more an idealised Victorian representation of spring, rather than a specific Roman festival.
The scene, with a procession of young people, flowers and musical instruments, is a joyful springtime celebration. It has been likened to the Roman spring festivals: Floralia, Cerealia or Ambarvalia.
The artist may have been inspired by descriptions of the spring festival in honour of Ceres or Flora as described by the Roman poet Ovid.
It also corresponds to Victorian Mayday festivities, where young girls went out into the countryside and collected flowers, then carried them back in blithesome procession.
Alma Tadema presents the scene as a parade in a festive jubilant setting, and it was something the people could relate to. Processions abounded in late Victorian England: receptions for visiting heads of state, royal weddings of Queen Victoria’s children/grandchildren, and particularly for the queen’s fifty, and then sixty, years of reign.
Here, the backdrop is ancient Rome and the procession winds through shining marble passageways.
Young girls carry pretty flowers or branches with buds or blossoms. Pipers are making music. Others follow carrying symbolic ritual items, including the bearers of a fine chalice, a casket and an ivory altar.
Excited onlookers line the way. These beautifully detailed groups of figures and the surrounding Roman architecture are the key to the painting. Lawrence Alma Tadema was known for his glorious details; it is said that Alma Tadema compositions are the sum of his details.
Looking closely, we behold richly ornamented columns and partial columns, full statues that replicate authentic Roman statues in silver and bronze, finely detailed nature elements, and above all, a dazzling feast of delicate yet vibrant spring flowers.
The faithfully wrought architecture of this Tadema Rome has numerous columns, arches and balconies to seem almost like a stage set. Indeed, the artist had a background in creating grandiose stage sets for Shakespeare plays in the 1880s that amply satisfied the Victorian taste for spectacle.
Against this stage-like background of white marble, and the pale, pastel clothing of the people, the strong bright colors of the flowers and garlands really stand out. The eye goes from one spot of color to another, then, in the distance, to the red walls of the “royal box”, where the viewer pauses to absorb a myriad of refined details.
The impact of the picture is the contrast between vibrant colorful flowers and the stark white marble. It is the flowers that provide the most important detail, a detail that reflects the artist’s well-known fondness for flowers. However, the flowers in the picture are not all Mayday blossoms; many were selected for their colors and symbolism rather than appropriateness of season.
One last detail gives us an insight into the Roman period that Alma Tadema wanted to represent in his celebration of spring: the inscription and relief on the archway at centre left of the picture.
The artist has reproduced the dedication sculpted on the Arch of Trajan in Benevento, near Rome, built to commemorate the opening of the Appian Way and completed during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian (reigned 117-138).
This leads us to presume that the setting for Lawrence Alma Tadema’s joyous “Spring” is Emperor Hadrian’s prosperous Rome.
Who says that art is a purely visual enjoyment?
This gracious painting of “Spring” is full of fragrant air, you can almost smell the faint perfume of the darling buds of May, you can hear the light lilting music, you can feel the warming rays of the sun.
“As the sun colors flowers, so art colors life”.
This was the artist’s personal motto, and the idea is present in every Lawrence Alma Tadema composition. Originally from Holland, the young Lawrence, or Lourens as he was originally named, studied art at the Royal Academy of Antwerp. In 1870, he moved to England where he settled permanently in London. He adjusted his name to the more Britannic “Lawrence”, and his Dutch origins are often overlooked.
He had a passion for nature and for ancient, particularly Roman, history; both of these interests are evident in many of his paintings.
“Spring” is the quintessence of the Lawrence Alma Tadema artistic style. He paid great attention to natural and historic details in his paintings, striving for authenticity.
He was an avid historical researcher and always strove to get historic details exactly right.
Where the setting is of Roman inspiration, as here, he made sure that architecture, dress and musical instruments were accurate.
He had a personal archive of photographs depicting Roman antiquities that enabled him to get true-to-life historical accuracy in his paintings. He possessed a tremendous curiosity about all things ancient and acquired a precious expertise which he poured into his art.
He created over 300 paintings in this vein, bringing antiquity vividly to life on the canvas.
The ancient Romans loved celebrations. They especially enjoyed a holiday they celebrated around the 25th of December.
Remind you of any date, eh?
The Romans feasted, gave gifts, were merry, and decorated their homes with greenery. Roman Festivals were also held in ancient Rome in response to particular events, or for a particular purpose such as to assuage or to honor the gods.
Check out Ten Roman Festivals that were pretty cool…
Anna Parenna Festival
The Roman Festivals for Anna Parenna, “goddess of the returning year” was held each year on the first day of the ancient year. Traditionally, Romans would cross the Tiber and “go abroad” into Etruria and have picnics in flimsy tents or huts made of branches. Both men and women would drink as much alcohol as they could, for it was thought that one would live for as many years as cups of alcohol one could drink on this day.
Saturnalia
This one’s a classic, and it gives us the origins of Christmas. Held in late December, it involves general feasting and present-giving. Most notably, though, it was the night when masters and slaves exchanged places. Can you imagine how awkward that would be? Sure it sounds like it’s a bit of fun, letting the slaves have a night off, but they were back as slaves the next day, so I can’t think they would let themselves have too much fun… The most important thing about this festival, though, is that the blokes do the cooking.
Lupercalia
Opinions are divided on whether this February festival is a ritual of purification or fertility. What they do know is that it involved barely-clad young men running through the streets, striking people with a goat thong. No, I do not know what a goat thong was. Moving on…
Veneralia
On April 1, this was another festival involving topsy-turviness (technical term there). It was the one day in which women (aristocrats and plebs mingling together) were allowed to enter the men’s baths, wearing myrtle wreaths in honour of Venus Verticordia. They would take a statue of Fortuna Virilis (fortune of men) in with them, removing her jewellery (yep, statues wore jewellery) to wash her.
Parilia
A rural festival, this one involves shepherds jumping over bonfires. And, um, sheep. The sheep jump over the bonfires. I can’t even imagine how that works.
Fornacalia
I’m not even kidding. Don’t get too excited, though, this one’s just about the baking of the corn. Honest. Corn-baking. Festival of ovens.
Parentalia
This one has shades of Halloween in that it’s a festival of the dead. Held in February in honour of the deified ancestors, this is a week of sacrifices (flower garlands, wheat, salt, wine-soaked bread, violets) to the manes or shades of the dead. At the end of the week, on the Feralia, the paterfamilias (senior male of the family) exorcises the ghosts, and the following day on the Caristia, everyone has a nice lunch and says nice things about the ancestors who are now (we hope) thoroughly gone again until next year.
Lemuria
No, this isn’t the holy Roman festival celebrating lemurs (though, wouldn’t that be awesome??), it’s another day of making sure the dead lie down. Possibly instituted in honour of the death of Remus (killed by his ambitious twin brother Romulus), this May festival is about appeasing the restless dead with the creative application of beans. Also, the Vestals baked cake. Salt cake, not layer cake, which is a shame because you’d think after a hard day of spirit-appeasing, everyone could do with a bit of cake.
Floralia
Another nearly week-long festival, this one in April-May and revolving around flowers, flowers and more flowers. Also colourful clothes, milk and honey. It was dedicated to the springy goddess Flora, and was particularly popular with prostitutes, who claimed the festival as their own. This is the origins of the May Day celebration, of course, with its ribbons and morris dancers. The Romans also held the Ludi Florales or Games of the Flowers, which actually involved lots of theatre and performing arts as well as good old circus acts. Apparently at the end of the performing animal acts in the Circus Maximus, all the animals were set free, which sounds like a very bad idea indeed.
The October Horse
The famous racing festival of Rome (Melbourne Cup and Ascot, eat your heart out), this one took part on the Ides (full moon) of October, and involved a two-horse chariot race. This one is famous because the right-hand (outer) horse of the winning pair would be slaughtered, beheaded, chopped into little bits and burned as sacrifice. And the Vestals would keep some of the blood, for cake-making purposes. Oh yes they would. And everyone thinks they’re so sweet…
The Bona Dea.
This one’s my favorite. The first rule of Bona Dea is, you don’t talk about Bona Dea. The second rule of Bona Dea is, YOU DON’T TALK ABOUT BONA DEA. This was a women’s festival, no men allowed, and the rites were famously secret. This did not prevent male writers and artists from getting lasciviously excited about what actually happened at these ceremonies. There were rumors of snakes. Of drinking wine and calling it ‘milk.’ Did I mention the snakes? The important thing, though, is that no women have recorded what went on, because speaking of it was forbidden, leaving us with just the speculations of men. I’m suspecting that Lindsey Davis had it right with mint tea and finger sandwiches, sadly.
What we do know is that in 62 BCE it was being hosted by the wife and mother of Julius Caesar, and a tribune called Publius Clodius sneaked in, disguised as a flute girl, in the hope of seducing Caesar’s wife. Honestly, you can’t make this stuff up. He was put on trial for blasphemy, but the women all refused to testify against him, saying in essence: the goddess will get him. And indeed she did…
Well, okay, he died in a riot, but it was near the temple.
Fine, it was within sight of the temple.
The moral of the story is that you don’t mess with the gods, okay? Just keep killing the animals and baking the cakes and everything’s Going to be Fine.
I like this particular painting because of the great arching ceiling and the expressions on the faces of the two women. It’s a masterpiece for certain. Just look at the details on the flower bush.
Here’s another favorite. I enjoy the deference of the people to the emperor. The photo below does not give it justice. You have to see it close up and look at the details to fully appreciate it.
Baths for bathing and relaxing were a common feature of Roman cities throughout the empire. The often huge bath complexes included a wide diversity of rooms offering different temperatures and facilities such as swimming pools and places to read, relax, and socialise.
Roman baths, with their need for large open spaces, were also important drivers in the evolution of architecture offering the first dome structures in Classical architecture.
Public baths were a feature of ancient Greek towns but were usually limited to a series of hip-baths.
The Romans expanded the idea to incorporate a wide array of facilities and baths became common in even the smaller towns of the Roman world, where they were often located near the forum. In addition to public baths, wealthy citizens often had their own private baths constructed as a part of their villa and baths were even constructed for the legions of the Roman army when on campaign.
However, it was in the large cities that these complexes (balnea or thermae) took on monumental proportions with vast colonnades and wide-spanning arches and domes. Baths were built using millions of fireproof terracotta bricks and the finished buildings were usually sumptuous affairs with fine mosaic floors, marble-covered walls, and decorative statues.
Generally opening around lunchtime and open until dusk, baths were accessible to all.
Generally opening around lunchtime and open until dusk, baths were accessible to all, both rich and poor. In the reign of Diocletian, for example, the entrance fee was a mere two denarii – the smallest denomination of bronze coinage. Sometimes, on occasions such as public holidays, the baths were even free to enter.
Typical features (listed in the probable order bathers went through) were:
apodyterium – changing rooms.
palaestrae – exercise rooms.
notatio – open-air swimming pool.
laconicaand sudatoria – superheated dry and wet sweating-rooms.
calidarium – hot room, heated and with a hot-water pool and a separate basin on a stand (labrum)
tepidarium – warm room, indirectly heated and with a tepid pool.
frigidarium – cool room, unheated and with a cold-water basin, often monumental in size and domed, it was the heart of the baths complex.
rooms for massage and other health treatments.
Additional facilities could include cold-water plunge baths, private baths, toilets, libraries, lecture halls, fountains, and outdoor gardens.
Early baths were heated using braziers, but from the 1st century BCE more sophisticated heating systems were used such as under-floor (hypocaust) heating fuelled by wood-burning furnaces (prafurniae).
This was not a new idea as Greek baths also employed such a system but, as was typical of the Romans, they took an idea and improved upon it for maximum efficiency.
The huge fires from the furnaces sent warm air under the raised floor (suspensurae) which stood on narrow pillars (pilae) of solid stone, hollow cylinders, or polygonal or circular bricks. The floors were paved over with 60 cm square tiles (bipedales) which were then covered in decorative mosaics.
The vast amount of water needed for the larger baths was supplied by purpose built aqueducts and regulated by huge reservoirs in the baths complex. The reservoir of the Baths of Diocletian in Rome, for example, could hold 20,000 m³ of water. Water was heated in large lead boilers fitted over the furnaces. The water could be added (via lead pipes) to the heated pools by using a bronze half-cylinder (testudo) connected to the boilers. Once released into the pool the hot water circulated by convection.
It wasn’t just Rome that the artist favored. He was interesting in ancient Greece, and Egypt as well. Here we see his marvelous attention to detail in his depiction of a grieving widow at the death of her husband. No one can depict the past like artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema could.
A frigidarium is a large cold pool at the Roman baths.When entering the bath house, one would go through the apodyterium, where they would store their clothes.After the caldarium and the tepidarium, which were used to open the pores of the skin, the frigidarium would be reached. The cold water would close the pores, however, hot water will open them.
-Frigidarium - Wikipedia
In this painting we see a woman dressing and attending to a bather of a Roman frigidarium. We can well imagine the attendants that would maintain this structure. As the cool water is pumped or flows from icy mountain springs, the area within the complex must have been cool and relaxing from the hot Italian Summer climate.
Another Opinion.
Not everyone sees value in fine art.
They consider it old, out-dated and obsolete.
It’s not “hip”, modern and “progressive”. So to add some balance and appreciation, here’s come work by one of the hottest artists in America today; Cy Twombly. His works easily reach millions of dollars each. And as a result he has become famous, and well regarded thorough out the art world.
Here’s one of his multi-million dollar masterpieces…
And, if that doesn’t evoke any emotions within you, perhaps this “piece” might… I am told that it evokes the childlike simplicity of complex undercurrents in modern contemporaneous thought…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
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James Jacques Joseh Tissot was a painter of realistic scenes in allegorical settings. His and his style is considered to be “French Victorian Neoclassical artist”. Ah, whatever it is called, I would really love to have a reprint of one of his works in all it’s large glorious full-size spectacular substance.
He loved to paint sea and naval scenes regarding people and relationships. When you look at his work, doesn’t it take you away to another time and another place?
The man is sporting the fashion at the time with white slacks with cuff or rolled up trousers. Those shoes are prevalent throughout Tissot’s painting career. They were really popular in the day. He also wears a thick wool jacket and the beard with bushy mustache.
I wonder what he is thinking.
What about the ladies? What do you suppose is on their minds, if anything?
A life alone without your wife. Caring for a young daughter. It is hard now, and it was hard back then. You can see the burdens of life on his shoulders. You can tell the pleasant joys of the child totally oblivious to the burdens of her father…
He looks at the beauty of the flower. What do you suppose is on his mind?
Oh, the furniture is different. The outfits are dated. And the news is via newspaper instead of social media on a smart hone. But this scene can be replicated anywhere in the world today. Be it China, or the USA. Be it Russia or Africa. It’s a story about domestic life and the carefree joys of children at play.
A family gathers in their backyard. You can see the rich colors and fabrics of that time period. The infant is under a colorful parasol to keep out of the sun, while the rest lie on the bearskin rug that covers the grass.
The mother to the left is wearing black. That means that she is in morning. Her husband is dead, maybe recently. No one is crying, but all are subdued. It’s almost like they are waiting for something…
I suppose that this is pre-Tic Tok. Young unmarried girls out for the afternoon doing some “window shopping”. They are looking at Japanese and Oriental objects for sale in a store. Personally, I find the outfit that the girl in red is wearing alluring. It’s a red velvet dress with a nice frilly bow in the back. They really had some cool and fun fashion back then.
I wonder what is going on here. Is that some interest I see in the eyes of the fair lass to the left? And what do you think that the man is thinking? What about the girl to the right. As the boat slowly and peacefully passes through the bay, I wonder what emotions grow and blossom on that short trip?
From a technical point of view, the detail in this painting is exceptional. Look at the dress, and the shimmering reflections on the highlights.
I do love the period dresses and styles.
There used to be a KTV in Shenzhen where the women would wear these big elaborate fancy dresses like this. Oh, my God! They were so alluring. One would get in front and lead you while one girl on the left and one on the right would lead you arm in arm to the KTV room for your private party.
Two couples on the boat. This is a farewell dinner. The ship will probably set off tomorrow morning. The emotions about what this means are on the faces of all involved. Though each one has different ideas and visions of what it is like.
It’s the night before loved ones leave.
Certainly you have all experienced this.
Look at the Captains face, and the the face of the woman in white.
I am stunned by the technical expertise on this work. Painting shades of white are difficult in itself, but the depth of shadowing and composition is just amazing. And look at the reflections on the floor. My God!
I think that the right kind of clothes enhances a person’s personal beauty and attractiveness. It is said that a man in a Tuxedo will increase his attractiveness to a woman by 20 points. I can say the same thing about clothing on a woman. You don’t need to show skin, or wear tight clothes to be attractive. It is what is not shown, and only hinted at that entices…
But it is a wonderful work showing two young ladies on board a boat enjoying the view with a sailor trying to get their attention. Perhaps in the hope that he can win their affections. Oh, but we know that. The girls are laying it coy. With the one on the right hiding her face behind a hand fan.
The other girl has some pretty complex emotions, don’t you think? I wonder what she thinks of the young sailor and whether she wants him to leave or stay?
This picture can take you away to another time and another place. It’s a place where shipboard romances are made, relationships are forged and strengthened, and where memories; treasured memories are made.
Again, note the gents shoes, and the straw hat. Notice that most of the women are wearing white for a nice Sunday outing in the great afternoon. While down below the people are laughing, dancing and being merry. It’s the human condition.
The prodigal son, or lost son, was an abuser of grace. Grace is most often defined as unmerited or unearned favor. He had a loving father, a good home, provision, a future, and an inheritance, but he traded it all in for temporal pleasures.
-Who Was the Prodigal Son? The Meaning of this Parable
Here, the Prodigal son returns. He has made a life for himself and has come back to make amends with his father. While in no way as wealthy, he is part of a crew. Notice the impressions on the faces of everyone else at the table. Their disapproval is thick and present.
Here, the Prodigal Son returns. Only his father was correct, and he asks for forgiveness and compassion. He returns wearing torn clothing, and without shoes. Life has not been good to him. It appears that he has lived a life as a beggar.
Look at the emotions on the faces of the couple in the background. Look at what is going on to the far left of the painting.
A Winter’s Walk
I find this painting extremely sexy. Look at that expression of calm confidence and strength. This is a woman who is in control of her life; a strong proud woman. She’s not just beautiful. She’s handsome.
The Hammock
Again, for the final image in this post we look at another great painting. Notice the picture composition, the balance of colors and the precision in the details on the leaves and the hammock. If this picture were to hand over my fireplace, it would certainly be a centerpiece of discussion, as well as set the mood for the entire household.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
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There is nothing wrong with reading a nice piece of literature. That’s true, don’t you know. Lately, I’ve been thinking about Ray Bradbury. His writings are so… oh so… special.
It’s some of the best that the world can offer.
Here’s a great little gem of a story. Please enjoy.
The Veldt – Ray Bradbury
“George, I wish you’d look at the nursery. “What’s wrong with it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, then.”
“I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to look at it.” “What would a psychologist want with a nursery?”
“You know very well what he’d want.” His wife was standing in the middle of the kitchen watching the stove busy humming to itself, making supper for four.
“It’s just that it is different now than it was.” “All right, let’s have a look.”
They walked down the hall of their HappyLife Home, which had cost them thirty thousand dollars with everything included. This house which clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them. Their approach was sensed by a hidden switch and the nursery light turned on when they came within ten feet of it. Similarly, behind them, in the halls, lights went on and off automatically as they left them behind.
“Well,” said George Hadley. They stood on the grass-like floor of the nursery. It was forty feet across by forty feet long and thirty feet high; it had cost half again as much as the rest of the house. “But nothing’s too good for our children,” George had said.
The room was silent and empty. The walls were white and two dimensional. Now, as George and Lydia Hadley stood in the center of the room, the walls made a quiet noise and seemed to fall away into the distance. Soon an African veldt appeared, in three dimensions, on all sides, in color. It looked real to the smallest stone and bit of yellow summer grass. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with a hot yellow sun.
George Hadley started to sweat from the heat. “Let’s get out of this sun,” he said. “This is a little too real. But I don’t see anything wrong.”
“Wait a moment, you’ll see,” said his wife.
Now hidden machines were beginning to blow a wind containing prepared smells toward the two people in the middle of the baked veldt. The hot straw smell of lion grass, the cool green smell of the hidden water hole, the strong dried blood smell of the animals, the smell of dust like red pepper in the hot air. And now the sounds: the thump of distant antelope feet on soft grassy ground, the papery rustle of vultures. A shadow passed through the sky. George Hadley looked up, and as he watched the shadow moved across his sweating face. “Horrible creatures,” he heard his wife say.
“The vultures.”
“You see, there are the lions, far over, that way. Now they’re on their way to the water hole.
They’ve just been eating,” said Lydia. “I don’t know what.”
“Some animal.” George Hadley put his hand above his eyes to block off the burning light and looked carefully. “A zebra or a baby giraffe, maybe.”
“Are you sure?” His wife sounded strangely nervous.
“No, it’s a little late to be sure,” he said, with a laugh. “Nothing over there I can see but cleaned bone, and the vultures dropping for what’s left.”
“Did you hear that scream?” she asked. “No.”
“About a minute ago?” “Sorry, no.”
The lions were coming. And again George Hadley was filled with respect for the brilliant mind that had come up with the idea for this room. A wonder of efficiency selling for an unbelievably low price. Every home should have one. Oh, occasionally they frightened you with their realism, they made you jump, gave you a scare. But most of the time they were fun for everyone. Not only your own son and daughter, but for yourself when you felt like a quick trip to a foreign land, a quick change of scenery. Well, here it was!
And here were the lions now, fifteen feet away. They looked so real, so powerful and shockingly real, that you could feel the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. Your mouth was filled with the dusty smell of their heated fur. The yellow of the lions and the summer grass was in your eyes like a picture in an expensive French wall hanging. And there was the sound of the lions quick, heavy breaths in the silent mid-day sun, and the smell of meat from their dripping mouths.
The lions stood looking at George and Lydia Hadley with terrible green-yellow eyes. “Watch out!” screamed Lydia.
The lions came running at them. Lydia turned suddenly and ran. Without thinking, George ran after her. Outside in the hall, after they had closed the door quickly and noisily behind them, he was laughing and she was crying. And they both stood shocked at the other’s reaction.
“George!”
“Lydia! Oh, my dear poor sweet Lydia!” “They almost got us!”
“Walls, Lydia, remember; glass walls, that’s all they are. Oh, they look real, I must admit – Africa in your living room. But it’s all created from three dimensional color film behind glass screens. And the machines that deliver the smells and sounds to go with the scenery. Here’s my handkerchief.”
“I’m afraid.” She came to him and put her body against him and cried as he held her. “Did you see? Did you feel? It’s too real.”
“Now, Lydia…”
“You’ve got to tell Wendy and Peter not to read any more on Africa.” “Of course – of course.” He patted her.
“Promise?” “Sure.”
“And lock the nursery for a few days until I can get over this.”
“You know how difficult Peter is about that. When I punished him a month ago by locking it for even a few hours – the way he lost his temper! And Wendy too. They live for the nursery.”
“It’s got to be locked, that’s all there is to it.”
“All right.” Although he wasn’t happy about it, he locked the huge door. “You’ve been working too hard. You need a rest.”
“I don’t know – I don’t know,” she said, blowing her nose, sitting down in a chair that immediately began to rock and comfort her. “Maybe I don’t have enough to do. Maybe I have time to think too much. Why don’t we shut the whole house off for a few days and take a vacation?”
“You mean you want to fry my eggs for me?” “Yes.” She nodded.
“And mend my socks?”
“Yes.” She nodded again excitedly, with tears in her eyes. “And clean the house?”
“Yes, yes – oh, yes!”
“But I thought that’s why we bought this house, so we wouldn’t have to do anything?”
“That’s just it. I feel like I don’t belong here. The house is wife and mother now, and nurse for the children. Can I compete with an African veldt? Can I give a bath and clean the children as efficiently or quickly as the automatic body wash can? I cannot. And it isn’t just me. It’s you. You’ve been awfully nervous lately.”
“I suppose I have been smoking too much.”
“You look as if you didn’t know what to do with yourself in this house, either. You smoke a little more every morning and drink a little more every afternoon, and you are taking more pills to help you sleep at night. You’re beginning to feel unnecessary too.”
“Am I?” He thought for a moment as he and tried to feel into himself to see what was really there. “Oh, George!” She looked past him, at the nursery door. “Those lions can’t get out of there, can
they?”
He looked at the door and saw it shake as if something had jumped against it from the other side. “Of course not,” he said.
At dinner they ate alone, for Wendy and Peter were at a special plastic fair across town. They had called home earlier to say they’d be late. So George Hadley, deep in thought, sat watching the dining-room table produce warm dishes of food from the machines inside.
“We forgot the tomato sauce,” he said.
“Sorry,” said a small voice within the table, and tomato sauce appeared.
As for the nursery, thought George Hadley, it won’t hurt for the children to be locked out of it a while. Too much of anything isn’t good for anyone. And it was clearly indicated that the children had been spending a little too much time on Africa. That sun. He could still feel it on his neck, like a hot paw. And the lions. And the smell of blood. Remarkable how the nursery read the thoughts in the children’s minds and created life to fill their every desire. The children thought lions, and there were lions. The children thought zebras, and there were zebras. Sun – sun. Giraffes – giraffes. Death and death.
That last. He ate the meat that the table had cut for him without tasting it. Death thoughts. They were awfully young, Wendy and Peter, for death thoughts. Or, no, you were never too young, really. Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else. When you were two years old you were shooting people with toy guns.
But this – the long, hot African veldt. The awful death in the jaws of a lion. And repeated again and again.
“Where are you going?”
George didn’t answer Lydia… he was too busy thinking of something else. He let the lights shine softly on ahead of him, turn off behind him as he walked quietly to the nursery door. He listened against it. Far away, a lion roared. He unlocked the door and opened it. Just before he stepped inside, he heard a faraway scream. And then another roar from the lions, which died down quickly. He stepped into Africa.
How many times in the last year had he opened this door and found Wonderland with Alice and the Mock Turtle, or Aladdin and his Magical Lamp, or Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz, or Dr. Doolittle, or the cow jumping over a very real-looking moon. All the most enjoyable creations of an imaginary world. How often had he seen Pegasus the winged horse flying in the sky ceiling, or seen explosions of red fireworks, or heard beautiful singing.
But now, is yellow hot Africa, this bake oven with murder in the heat. Perhaps Lydia was right. Perhaps they needed a little vacation from the fantasy which was growing a bit too real for ten-year- old children. It was all right to exercise one’s mind with unusual fantasies, but when the lively child mind settled on one pattern..?
It seemed that, at a distance, for the past month, he had heard lions roaring, and noticed their strong smell which carried as far away as his study door. But, being busy, he had paid it no attention.
George Hadley stood on the African veldt alone. The lions looked up from their feeding, watching
him. The only thing wrong with the image was the open door. Through it he could see his wife, far down the dark hall, like a framed picture. She was still eating her dinner, but her mind was clearly on other things.
“Go away,” he said to the lions.
They did not go. He knew exactly how the room should work. You sent out your thoughts. Whatever you thought would appear. “Let’s have Aladdin and his lamp,” he said angrily. The veldt remained; the lions remained.
“Come on, room! I demand Aladdin!” he said.
Nothing happened. The lions made soft low noises in the hot sun. “Aladdin!”
He went back to dinner. “The fool room’s out of order,” he said. “It won’t change.” “Or…”
“Or what?”
“Or it can’t change,” said Lydia, “because the children have thought about Africa and lions and killing so many days that the room’s stuck in a pattern it can’t get out of.”
“Could be.”
“Or Peter’s set it to remain that way.” “Set it?”
“He may have got into the machinery and fixed something.” “Peter doesn’t know machinery.”
“He’s a wise one for ten. That I.Q. of his…” “But…”
“Hello, Mom. Hello, Dad.”
The Hadleys turned. Wendy and Peter were coming happily in the front door, with bright blue eyes and a smell of fresh air on their clothes from their trip in the helicopter.
“You’re just in time for supper,” said both parents.
“We’re full of strawberry ice-cream and hot dogs,” said the children, holding hands. “But we’ll sit and watch.”
“Yes, come tell us about the nursery,” said George Hadley.
The brother and sister looked at him and then at each other. “Nursery?”
“All about Africa and everything,” said the father with a false smile. “I don’t understand,” said Peter.
“Your mother and I were just traveling through Africa. “There’s no Africa in the nursery,” said Peter simply. “Oh, come now, Peter. We know better.”
“I don’t remember any Africa,” said Peter to Wendy. “Do you?” “No.”
“Run see and come tell.” She did as he told her.
“Wendy, come back here!” said George Hadley, but she was gone. The house lights followed her like fireflies. Too late, he realized he had forgotten to lock the nursery door after his last visit.
“Wendy’ll look and come tell us,” said Peter. “She doesn’t have to tell me. I’ve seen it.” “I’m sure you’re mistaken, Father.”
“I’m not, Peter. Come along now.”
But Wendy was back. “It’s not Africa,” she said breathlessly.
“We’ll see about this,” said George Hadley, and they all walked down the hall together and opened the door.
There was a green, lovely forest, a lovely river, a purple mountain, high voices singing. And there was Rima the bird girl, lovely and mysterious. She was hiding in the trees with colorful butterflies, like flowers coming to life, flying about her long hair. The African veldt was gone. The lions were gone. Only Rima was here now, singing a song so beautiful that it brought tears to your eyes.
George Hadley looked in at the changed scene. “Go to bed,” he said to the children. They opened their mouths.
“You heard me,” he said.
They went off to the air tube, where a wind blew them like brown leaves up to their sleeping rooms. George Hadley walked through the forest scene and picked up something that lay in the corner near
where the lions had been. He walked slowly back to his wife. “What is that?” she asked.
“An old wallet of mine,” he said. He showed it to her. The smell of hot grass was on it… and the smell of a lion. It was wet from being in the lion’s mouth, there were tooth marks on it, and there was dried blood on both sides. He closed the door and locked it, tight.
They went to up to bed but couldn’t sleep. “Do you think Wendy changed it?” she said at last, in the dark room.
“Of course.”
“Made it from a veldt into a forest and put Rima there instead of lions?” “Yes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. But it’s staying locked until I find out.” “How did your wallet get there?”
“I don’t know anything,” he said, “except that I’m beginning to be sorry we bought that room for the children. If children are suffering from any kind of emotional problem, a room like that…”
“It’s supposed to help them work off their emotional problems in a healthy way.” “I’m starting to wonder.” His eyes were wide open, looking up at the ceiling.
“We’ve given the children everything they ever wanted. Is this our reward – secrecy, not doing what we tell them?”
“Who was it said, ‘Children are carpets, they should be stepped on occasionally’? We’ve never lifted a hand. They’re unbearable – let’s admit it. They come and go when they like; they treat us as if we were the children in the family. They’re spoiled and we’re spoiled.”
“They’ve been acting funny ever since you wouldn’t let them go to New York a few months ago.” “They’re not old enough to do that alone, I explained.”
“I know, but I’ve noticed they’ve been decidedly cool toward us since.”
“I think I’ll have David McClean come tomorrow morning to have a look at Africa.” “But it’s not Africa now, it’s South America and Rima.”
“I have a feeling it’ll be Africa again before then.”
A moment later they heard the screams. Two screams. Two people screaming from downstairs. And then a roar of lions.
“Wendy and Peter aren’t in their rooms,” said his wife.
He lay in his bed with his beating heart. “No,” he said. “They’ve broken into the nursery.”
“Those screams – they sound familiar.” “Do they?”
“Yes, awfully.”
And although their beds tried very hard, the two adults couldn’t be rocked to sleep for another hour. A smell of cats was in the night air.
* * * “Father?” asked Peter the next morning.
“Yes.”
Peter looked at his shoes. He never looked at his father any more, nor at his mother. “You aren’t going to lock up the nursery for good, are you?”
“That all depends.”
“On what?” said Peter sharply.
“On you and your sister. If you break up this Africa with a little variety – oh, Sweden perhaps, or Denmark or China…”
“I thought we were free to play as we wished.” “You are, within reasonable limits.”
“What’s wrong with Africa, Father?”
“Oh, so now you admit you have been thinking up Africa, do you?” “I wouldn’t want the nursery locked up,” said Peter coldly. “Ever.”
“Matter of fact, we’re thinking of turning the whole house off for about a month. Live sort of a happy family existence.”
“That sounds terrible! Would I have to tie my own shoes instead of letting the machine do it? And brush my own teeth and comb my hair and give myself a bath?”
“It would be fun for a change, don’t you think?”
No, it would be horrible. I didn’t like it when you took out the picture painter last month.” “That’s because I wanted you to learn to paint all by yourself, son.”
“I don’t want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else is there to do?” “All right, go play in Africa.”
“Will you shut off the house sometime soon?” “We’re considering it.”
“I don’t think you’d better consider it any more, Father.” “I won’t have any threats from my son!”
“Very well.” And Peter walked off to the nursery.
* * * “Am I on time?” said David McClean. “Breakfast?” asked George Hadley.
“Thanks, had some. What’s the trouble?” “David, you’re a psychologist.”
“I should hope so.”
“Well, then, have a look at our nursery. You saw it a year ago when you dropped by; did you notice anything unusual about it then?”
“Can’t say I did; the usual violences, a tendency toward a slight paranoia here or there. But this is usual in children because they feel their parents are always doing things to make them suffer in one way or another. But, oh, really nothing.”
They walked down the hall. “I locked it up,” explained the father, “and the children broke back into it during the night. I let them stay so they could form the patterns for you to see.”
There was a terrible screaming from the nursery.
“There it is,” said George Hadley. “See what you make of it.”
They walked in on the children without knocking. The screams had stopped. The lions were feeding.
“Run outside a moment, children,” said George Hadley. “No, don’t change the mental picture. Leave the walls as they are. Get!”
With the children gone, the two men stood studying the lions sitting together in the distance, eating with great enjoyment whatever it was they had caught.
“I wish I knew what it was,” said George Hadley. “Sometimes I can almost see. Do you think if I brought high-powered binoculars here and…”
David McClean laughed dryly. “Hardly.” He turned to study all four walls. “How long has this been going on?”
“A little over a month.”
“It certainly doesn’t feel good.” “I want facts, not feelings.”
“My dear George, a psychologist never saw a fact in his life. He only hears about feelings; things that aren’t always clearly expressed. This doesn’t feel good, I tell you. Trust me. I have a nose for something bad. This is very bad. My advice to you is to have the whole damn room torn down and your children brought to me every day during the next year for treatment.”
“Is it that bad?”
“I’m afraid so. One of the original uses of these rooms was so that we could study the patterns left on the walls by the child’s mind. We could study them whenever we wanted to, and help the child. In this case, however, the room has become a means of creating destructive thoughts, instead of helping to make them go away.”
“Didn’t you sense this before?”
“I sensed only that you had spoiled your children more than most. And now you’re letting them down in some way. What way?”
“I wouldn’t let them go to New York.” “What else?”
“I’ve taken a few machines from the house and threatened them, a month ago, with closing up the nursery unless they did their homework. I did close it for a few days to show I meant business.”
“Ah, ha!”
“Does that mean anything?”
“Everything. Where before they had a Santa Claus now they have a Scrooge. Children prefer Santa. You’ve let this room and this house replace you and your wife in your children’s feelings. This room is their mother and father, far more important in their lives than their real parents. And now you come along and want to shut it off. No wonder there’s hatred here. You can feel it coming out of the sky. Feel that sun. George, you’ll have to change your life. Like too many others, you’ve built it around creature comforts. Why, you’d go hungry tomorrow if something went wrong in your kitchen. You wouldn’t know how to cook an egg. All the same, turn everything off. Start new. It’ll take time. But we’ll make good children out of bad in a year, wait and see.”
“But won’t the shock be too much for the children, shutting the room up without notice, for good?” “I don’t want them going any deeper into this, that’s all.”
The lions were finished with their bloody meat. They were standing on the edge of the clearing watching the two men.
“Now I’m feeling worried,” said McClean. “Let’s get out of here. I never have cared for these damned rooms. Make me nervous.”
“The lions look real, don’t they?” said George Hadley. I don’t suppose there’s any way…” “What?”
“…that they could become real?” “Not that I know.”
“Some problem with the machinery, someone changing something inside?” “No.”
They went to the door.
“I don’t imagine the room will like being turned off,” said the father. “Nothing ever likes to die – even a room.”
“I wonder if it hates me for wanting to switch it off?”
“Paranoia is thick around here today,” said David McClean. “You can see it everywhere. Hello.” He bent and picked up a bloody scarf. “This yours?”
“No.” George Hadley’s face set like stone. “It belongs to Lydia.”
They went to the control box together and threw the switch that killed the nursery.
The two children were so upset that they couldn’t control themselves. They screamed and danced around and threw things. They shouted and cried and called them rude names and jumped on the furniture.
“You can’t do that to the nursery, you can’t!” “Now, children.”
The children threw themselves onto a sofa, crying.
“George,” said Lydia Hadley, “turn it on again, just for a few moments. You need to give them some more time.”
“No.”
“You can’t be so cruel…”
“Lydia, it’s off, and it stays off. And the whole damn house dies as of here and now. The more I see of the mess we’ve put ourselves in, the more it sickens me. We’ve been thinking of our machine assisted selves for too long. My God, how we need a breath of honest air!”
And he marched about the house turning off the voice clocks, the stoves, the heaters, the shoe cleaners, the body washer, the massager, and every other machine he could put his hand to.
The house was full of dead bodies, it seemed. It felt like a mechanical cemetery. So silent. None of
the humming hidden energy of machines waiting to function at the tap of a button.
“Don’t let them do it!” cried Peter to the ceiling, as if he was talking to the house, the nursery. “Don’t let Father kill everything.” He turned to his father. “Oh, I hate you!”
“Saying things like that won’t get you anywhere.” “I wish you were dead!”
“We were, for a long while. Now we’re going to really start living. Instead of being handled and massaged, we’re going to live.”
Wendy was still crying and Peter joined her again. “Just a moment, just one moment, just another moment of nursery,” they cried.
“Oh, George,” said the wife, “it can’t hurt.”
“All right – all right, if they’ll just shut up. One minute, mind you, and then off forever.” “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!” sang the children, smiling with wet faces.
“And then we’re going on a vacation. David McClean is coming back in half an hour to help us move out and get to the airport. I’m going to dress. You turn the nursery on for a minute, Lydia, just a minute, mind you.”
And the three of them went off talking excitedly while he let himself be transported upstairs through the air tube and set about dressing himself. A minute later Lydia appeared.
“I’ll be glad when we get away,” she said thankfully. “Did you leave them in the nursery?”
“I wanted to dress too. Oh, that horrible Africa. What can they see in it?”
“Well, in five minutes we’ll be on our way to Iowa. Lord, how did we ever get in this house? What made us buy a nightmare?”
“Pride, money, foolishness.”
“I think we’d better get downstairs before those kids spend too much time with those damned beasts again.”
Just then they heard the children calling, “Daddy, Mommy, come quick – quick!”
They went downstairs in the air tube and ran down the hall. The children were nowhere in sight. “Wendy? Peter!”
They ran into the nursery. The veldt was empty save for the lions waiting, looking at them. “Peter, Wendy?”
The door closed loudly.
“Wendy, Peter!”
George Hadley and his wife turned quickly and ran back to the door.
“Open the door!” cried George Hadley, trying the handle. “Why, they’ve locked it from the outside! Peter!” He beat at the door. “Open up!”
He heard Peter’s voice outside, against the door.
“Don’t let them switch off the nursery and the house,” he was saying.
Mr. and Mrs. George Hadley beat at the door. “Now, don’t be silly, children. It’s time to go. Mr. McClean’ll be here in a minute and…”
And then they heard the sounds.
The lions were on three sides of them in the yellow veldt grass. They walked quietly through the dry grass, making long, deep rolling sounds in their throats. The lions!
Mr. Hadley looked at his wife and they turned and looked back at the beasts edging slowly forward, knees bent, tails in the air.
Mr. and Mrs. Hadley screamed.
And suddenly they realized why those other screams had sounded familiar.
* * *
“Well, here I am,” said David McClean from the nursery door. “Oh, hello.” He looked carefully at the two children seated in the center of the room eating a little picnic lunch. On the far them he could see the water hole and the yellow veldt. Above was the hot sun. He began to sweat. “Where are your father and mother?”
The children looked up and smiled. “Oh, they’ll be here directly.” “Good, we must get going.”
At a distance Mr. McClean saw the lions fighting over something and then quietening down to feed in silence under the shady trees. He put his hand to his eyes to block out the sun and looked at them. Now the lions were done feeding. They moved to the water hole to drink. A shadow moved over Mr. McClean’s hot face. Many shadows moved. The vultures were dropping down from the burning sky.
“A cup of tea?” asked Wendy in the silence.
The End
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This is a very short science-fiction story by Ray Bradbury. It is about how a race of extraterrestrials invade the United States. They use American children.
Oh, it was to be so jolly! What a game! Such excitement they hadn’t known in years. The children catapulted this way and
that across the green
lawns, shouting at
each other, holding hands, flying in circles, climbing trees, laughing. Overhead the rockets flew, and beetle cars whispered
by on the streets,
but the children
played on. Such fun, such tremulous joy, such tumbling
and
hearty screaming.
Mink ran into the house, all dirty and sweat. For her seven years she was loud and strong and definite.
Her mother, Mrs. Morris, hardly saw her as she yanked out drawers
and rattled pans and tools into
a large sack.
‘Heavens, Mink, what’s going on?’
‘The most exciting
game ever!’ gasped Mink, pink-faced. ‘Stop
and
get your breath,’
said the mother.
‘No, I’m all
right,’ gasped Mink. ‘Okay I take these things, Mom?’ ‘But don’t dent
them,’ said Mrs. Morris.
‘Thank you, thank you!’
cried Mink, and boom! She was gone, like
a rocket. Mrs. Morris surveyed
the fleeing
tot. ‘What’s the name of
the game?’ ‘Invasion!’
said Mink. The door slammed.
In every yard on the street children brought out knives and forks and pokers and old stovepipes and can-openers.
It was an interesting fact that this fury and bustle occurred
only among the younger children. The older ones, those ten years and more, disdained the affair
and marched scornfully off on hikes or played a more dignified version
of hide-and-seek on their own.
Meanwhile, parents came
and
went in chromium beetles. Repair men
came to repair the vacuum elevators in houses, to fix fluttering television sets or hammer upon stubborn
food-delivery tubes. The adult civilization passed and repassed the busy youngsters, jealous of the fierce energy of the wild tots, tolerantly amused at their flourishings, longing to join in themselves.
‘This and this and this,’said Mink, instructing the thers with their assorted spoons and wrenches. ‘Do that, and bring thatover here. No! Here,ninny! Right. Now, get back while
I fix this.’ Tongue in
teeth, face wrinkled in
thought. ‘Like that.
See?’
‘Yayyy!’ shouted
the kids.
Twelve-year-old
Joseph Connors ran
up.
‘Go away,’ said Mink straight at
him.
‘I wanna
play,’ said Joseph. ‘Can’t!’
said Mink.
‘Why not?’
‘You’d
just make fun of us.’ ‘Honest, I wouldn’t.’
‘No. We know you.Go away or we’ll
kick you.’
Another twelve-year-old boy whirred by on little motor skates. ‘Hey, Joe! Come on!
Let them
sissies play!’
Joseph showed
reluctance and a certain
wistfulness ‘I wantto play,’ he said. ‘You’re
old,’ said Mink firmly.
‘Not thatold,’ said Joe sensibly.
‘You’d only laugh and spoil the Invasion.’
The boy on the motor skates made a rude lip noise. ‘Come on, Joe! Them and their fairies!
Nuts!’
Joseph walked off
slowly. He kept looking back, all
down the block.
Mink was already busy again. She made a kind of apparatus
with her gathered
equipment. She had appointed another little girl with a pad and pencil to take down notes in painful slow scribbles.
Their voices rose and fell in
the warm sunlight.
All around them the city hummed.
The streets were lined with good green and peaceful trees. Only the wind made a conflict across the city, across the country, across the continent. In a thousand other cities there were trees and children and avenues, businessmen in their quiet offices taping their voices, or watching television. Rockets hovered like darning
needles in the blue sky. There was the universal, quiet conceit and easiness of men accustomed to peace, quite certain there would never be trouble again. Arm in arm, men all over earth were a united front. The perfect
weapons were held in equal trust by all nations. A situation
of incredibly beautiful balance had been brought about. There were
no traitors among
men, no unhappy
ones, no disgruntled ones; therefore the world was based upon
a stable ground. Sunlight
illumined half the world and
the trees drowsed in a tide of warm air.
Mink’s mother, from
her upstairs window, gazed down.
The children. She looked
upon them and shook her head.
Well, they’d eat well, sleep well, and be
in
school on Monday. Bless their vigorous
little bodies. She listened.
Mink talked earnestly to someone
near the rose bush – though
there was no one
there.
These odd children.
And the little girl, what was her name? Anna? Anna took notes on a pad. First, Mink asked
the rosebush a question, then called the answer to Anna.
‘Triangle,’ said Mink.
‘What’s
a tri,’ said Anna with difficulty, ‘angle?’ ‘Never mind,’
said Mink.
‘How you spell it?’
asked Anna.
‘T-r-i
—‘ spelled Mink slowly,
then snapped, ‘Oh, spell it yourself!’ She went on to other words. ‘Beam,’
she
said.
‘I haven’t
got tri,’ said Anna, ‘angle
down yet!’ ‘Well, hurry, hurry!’
cried Mink.
Mink’s mother leaned out of the upstairs window. ‘A-n-g-I-e,’ she spelled down at
Anna.
‘Oh, thanks, Mrs. Morris,’
said Anna.
‘Certainly,’ said Mink’s
mother and
withdrew, laughing,
to
dust the hall
with an electro-duster
magnet.
The voices wavered
on the
shimmery air. ‘Beam,’ said Anna.
Fading.
Four-nine-seven-A-and-B-and-X,’ said Mink, far away, seriously. ‘And a fork and a string and a — hex-hex-agony
— hexagonal!’
At lunch Mink gulped milk at one toss and was at the door. Her mother slapped the
table.
‘You sit right back down,’ commanded Mrs. Morris. ‘Hot soup in a minute.’
She poked a red button
on the kitchen butler, and ten seconds later something landed with a hump in the rubber receiver. Mrs. Morris opened it, took out a can with a pair of aluminium holders, unsealed
it with
a flick, and poured hot soup
into a bowl.
During all this Mink fidgeted.
‘Hurry, Mom! This is a matter of life and death! Aw -‘ ‘I was the
same way at your age. Always life
and
death, I know.’
Mink banged away at the soup. ‘Slow down,’ said
Mom.
‘Can’t,’
said Mink. ‘Drill’s
waiting for me.’ ‘Who’s Drill? What a peculiar name,’
said Mom. ‘You don’t
know him,’ said Mink.
‘A new boy in the neighbourhood?’
asked Mom.
‘He’s new all right,’ said Mink. She started on her second bowl.
‘Which one is Drill?’
asked Mom.
‘He’s around,’ said Mink evasively. ‘You’ll make fun. Everybody pokes fun. Gee, darn. ‘
‘Is Drill shy?’
‘Yes. No. In a
way.
Gosh, Mom, I got to run if we want to have
the Invasion!’ ‘Who’s invading what?’
‘Martians
invading Earth. Well, not exactly
Martians. They’re – I don’t know. From up.’
She pointed with her spoon.
Mink rebelled.
‘You’re laughing! You’ll kill Drill
and
everybody.’ ‘I didn’t
mean to,’ said Mom.
‘Drill’s a Martian?’
‘No. He’s – well – maybe from Jupiter
or Saturn or Venus. Anyway, he’s had a hard
time.’
‘I imagine.’
Mrs. Morris hid her
mouth behind her hand. ‘They couldn’t
figure a way to attack Earth.’
‘We’re impregnable,’
said Mom in mock seriousness.
‘That’s
the word Drill used!
Impreg – That was the word, Mom.’ ‘My, my, Drill’s a
brilliant little boy. Two-bit words.’
‘They couldn’t figure a way to attack,
Mom. DrilI says – he says in order to make a good fight you got to have a new way of surprising
people. That way you win. And he says also you got
to have help from your enemy.’
‘A fifth column,’ said
Mom.
‘Yeah. That’s what Drill said. And they couldn’t figure a way to surprise Earth or get
help.’
‘No wonder. We’re pretty darn strong.’ Mom laughed, cleaning up. Mink sat there, staring at
the table,
seeing what she
was
talking about.
‘Until, one
day,’ whispered Mink melodramatically, ‘they thought of children!’
‘Well!’said Mrs. Morris brightly.
‘And they thought
of how grown-ups are so busy they never look under rose bushes or on lawns!’
‘Only for snails and fungus.’
‘And
then there’s something about dim-dims.’ ‘Dim-dims?’
‘Dimens-shuns.’ ‘Dimensions?’
‘Four of ‘em! And there’s something about kids under nine and imagination. It’s real funny to
hear
Drill talk.’
Mrs. Morris was tired. ‘Well, it must he funny. You’re keeping Drill waiting now. It’s getting late in the day and, if you want to have your Invasion before your supper bath, you’d better jump.’
‘Do I have to take a bath?’ growled Mink.
‘You do! Why is it children
hate water? No matterwhat age you live in children
hate water behind
the ears!’
‘Drill says I won’t have to take baths,’ said Mink. ‘Oh, he
does, does he?’
‘He told all the kids that. No more baths. And we can stay up till ten o’clock
and go to two
televisor shows on Saturday ‘stead of one!’
‘Well, Mr.
Drill better mind his p’s and q’s. I’ll call up his mother and —‘
Mink went to the door. ‘We’re having trouble with guys like Pete Britz and Dale Jerrick. They’re growing up. They make fun. They’re
worse than parents. They just won’t believe
in Drill. They’re so snooty, ‘cause they’re growing up. You’d think they’d know better. They
were little only a
coupla years ago. I hate them worst. We’ll
kill them first.’
‘Your father and I last?’
‘Drill says you’re dangerous. Know why? ‘Cause you don’t believe in Martians!
They’re going to let usrun the world. Well, not just us, but the kids over in the next block, too. I
might be queen.’ She
opened the door.
‘Mom?’
‘Yes?’
‘What’s lodge-ick?’
‘Logic? Why, dear, logic is knowing what things are true and not
true.’
‘He mentionedthat,’ said Mink. ‘And what’s im-pres-sion-able?’ It took her a minute to say it.
‘Why, it means –‘
Her
mother looked at the floor,
laughing gently. ‘It means — to be
a child, dear.’
‘Thanks for lunch!’ Mink ran out, then stuck her head back in. ‘Mom, I’ll be sure you won’t be hurt
much, really!’
‘Well, thanks,’ said
Mom.
Slamwent the door.
At four o’clock the audio-visor buzzed. Mrs. Morris flipped the tab. ‘Hello, Helen!’ she said in
welcome.
‘Hello, Mary. How are
things in New York?’
‘Fine. How are things in Scranton? You
look
tired.’ ‘So
do you.
The children.
Underfoot,’ said
Helen.
Mrs. Morris sighed.
‘My Mink
too. The super-Invasion.’ Helen
laughed. ‘Are your kids playing
that game too?’
‘Lord, yes. Tomorrow it’ll be geometrical jacks and motorized hopscotch. Were we this bad when
we were kids in
‘48?’
‘Worse. Japs and
Nazis. Don’t know how my parents put up with me.
Tomboy.’ ‘Parents learn to shut their ears.’
A silence.
‘What’s wrong, Mary?’
asked Helen.
Mrs. Morris’s eyes were half closed; her tongue slid slowly thoughtfully, over her lower lip. ‘Eh?’ She jerked. ‘Oh, nothing. Just thought about that.Shutting ears and such. Never mind. Where
were we?’
‘My boy Tim’s got a crush on
some guy named DrilI,I
think it was.’ ‘Must be a new password.
Mink likes him too.’
‘Didn’t know it had got as far as New York. Word of mouth,
I imagine. Looks like a scrap drive. I talked to Josephine and she said her kids — that’s in Boston – are wild on this new game.
It’s sweeping the country.’
At this moment Mink trotted into the kitchen
to gulp a glass of water.
Mrs. Morris turned. ‘How’re
things going?’
‘Almost finished,’
said Mink.
‘Swell,’ said Mrs. Morris. ‘What’s that?’
‘A yo-yo,’ said Mink. ‘Watch.’
She flung
the yo-yo down its string. Reaching
the end it
— It vanished.
‘See?’ said Mink. ‘Ope!’ Dibbling her finger, she made the yo-yo reappear
and zip up the string.
‘Do that again,’ said her mother.
‘Can’t. Zero hour’s
five o’clock! Bye.’ Mink exited, zipping her
yo-yo.
On the audio-visor, Helen laughed. ‘Tim brought one of those yo-yos in this morning, but when
I got
curious he said he
wouldn’t show it to me, and when
I tried to work it,
finally, it wouldn’t work.’
‘You’re not impressionable,’ said Mrs. Morris. ‘What?’
‘Never mind. Something I thought of. Can I help you, Helen?’ ‘I wanted to get that black-and-white cake recipe –‘
The hour drowsed
by. The way waned. The sun lowered in the peaceful blue sky. Shadows lengthened on the green lawns. The laughter and excitement continued. One little
girl ran away, crying.
Mrs.
Morris came out the front door.
‘Mink was that
Peggy Ann crying?’
Mink was bent over in the yard, near the rosebush. ‘Yeah. She’s a scarebaby. We won’t let her play, now. She’s getting
too old
to play. I guess she grew up all
of a sudden.’
‘Is that why she cried? Nonsense. Give me a civil answer, young lady, or inside you
come!’
Mink whirled in consternation, mixed with irritation. ‘I can’t quit now. It’s almost time.
I’ll be good. I’m
sorry.’
‘Did you hit Peggy Ann?’
‘No, honest. You ask her. It was something — well, she’s just a scaredy pants.’
The ring of children
drew in around Mink where she scowled at her work with spoons and a kind of square-shaped arrangement of hammers and pipes. ‘There and there,’ murmured Mink.
‘What’s wrong?’ said
Mrs.
Morris.
‘Drill’s stuck. Half-way. If we could only get him all the way through it’d be easier.
Then the others could come through after
him.’ ‘Can I help?’
‘No thanks. I’ll fix it.’
‘All right. I’ll
call you for your bath in
half
an hour. I’m tired
of watching you.’
She went in and sat in the electric
relaxing chair, sipping a little
beer from a half- empty glass. The chair massaged her back. Children, children. Children and love and hate, side by side. Sometimes children loved you, hated you -~ all in half a second. Strange children, did they ever forget or forgive the whippings
and the harsh, strict words of command?
She wondered. How can you ever forget or forgive those over and above you, those tall
and silly dictators?
Time passed. A curious,
waiting silence came upon the
street, deepening.
Five o’clock.
A clock sang softly somewhere
in the house in a quiet musical voice: ‘Five o’clock — five o’clock. Time’s a-wasting.
Five o’clock —‘ and purred away
into silence.
Zero hour.
Mrs. Morris chuckled
in her throat. Zero
hour.
A beetle car hummed
into the driveway.
Mr. Morris. Mrs. Morris smiled. Mr. Morris got out of the beetle,
locked it, and called hello to Mink at her work. Mink ignored
him. He laughed
and
stood for a moment watching
the children. Then he
walked up the front steps.
‘Hello, darling.’
‘Hello, Henry.’
She strained forward on
the edge of the chair, listening.
The children were silent. Too silent.
He emptied
his
pipe, refilled it. ‘Swell day. Makes you
glad to be alive.’
Buzz.
‘What’s that?’
asked Henry.
‘I don’t know.’ She got up suddenly,
her eyes widening. She was going to say something. She stopped it. Ridiculous. Her nerves jumped. ‘Those children haven’t anything dangerous out
there, have they?’ she said.
‘Nothing but pipes and
hammers. Why?’ ‘Nothing
electrical?’
‘Heck, no,’ said Henry. ‘I
looked.’
She walked to the kitchen.
The buzzing continued. ‘Just
the same, you’d better go
tell them to quit. It’s after
five. Tell them – ‘
Her
eyes widened and narrowed. ‘Tell
them to put off their Invasion until tomorrow.’ She laughed, nervously.
The buzzing grew louder.
‘What are they up to? I’d better
go look, all right.’ The
explosion!
The house shook with dull sound. There were other explosions in other yards on other streets.
Involuntarily, Mrs. Morris screamed. ‘Up this way!’ she cried senselessly, knowing no sense, no reason. Perhaps she saw something from the corners of her eyes; perhaps she smelled a new odor or heard a new noise. There was no time to argue with Henry to convince him. Let
him think her insane. Yes, insane! Shrieking,
she
ran upstairs. He ran after her to see what she was up to. ‘In the attic!’
she screamed. ‘That’s where it is!’ It was only a poor excuse to get him in
the attic in time.
Oh, God – in time!
Another explosion
outside. The children
screamed with delight, as if at a great fireworks
display.
‘It’s not in the attic,’
cried Henry. ‘It’s outside!’
‘No, no!’ Wheezing, gasping, she fumbled at the attic door. ‘I’ll show you. Hurry!
I’ll show you!’
They tumbled into the attic. She slammed the door, locked it, took the key, threw it into
a far,
cluttered corner.
She was babbling wild stuff now. It came out of her. All the subconscious suspicion and fear that had gathered
secretly all afternoon and fermented like a wine in her. All the little revelations and
knowledges and sense that had
bothered her all day and
which she had logically
and carefully and sensibly rejected
and
censored. Now
it
exploded in her and
shook her to bits.
‘There, there,’
she said, sobbing against the door. ‘We’re safe until tonight.
Maybe we can sneak out.
Maybe we can escape!’
Henry blew up too, but for another reason.
‘Are you crazy? Why’d you throw that key away?
Damn it, honey!’
‘Yes, yes,
I’m
crazy, if it helps, but
stay here with me!’ ‘I don’t
know how in hell
I canget out!’
Below them, Mink’s voice. The husband stopped.
There was a great universal humming and sizzling, a screaming
and giggling. Downstairs the audio-televisor buzzed and buzzed insistently, alarmingly, violently. Is that Helen calling? thought Mrs. Morris. And is she calling
about what I think she’s calling about?
Footsteps came
into the house. Heavy footsteps.
‘Who’s coming in my house?’
demanded Henry angrily. ‘Whose tramping around down
there?’
Heavy feet. Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty of them. Fifty persons crowding into the house.
The humming. The giggling of the children.
‘This way!’ cried Mink, below. ‘Who’s downstairs?’ roared
Henry. ‘Who’s there!’
‘Hush. Oh, nononononono!’ said his wife
weakly, holding him. ‘Please, be quiet. They might
go
away.’
‘Mom?’ called Mink.
‘Dad?’ A pause. ‘Where are
you?’
Heavy footsteps, heavy, heavy, very heavyfootsteps, came up the
stairs. Mink leading them. ‘Mom?’
A hesitation. ‘Dad?’ A waiting,
a silence.
Humming. Footsteps
toward the attic. Mink’s first.
They trembled together
in silence in the attic, Mr. and Mrs. Morris. For some reason
the electric humming,
the queer cold light suddenly visible under the door crack, the strange
odor and the alien sound of eagerness in Mink’s voice finally got through
to Henry Morris too. He
stood, shivering, in the dark silence, his wife
beside him.
‘Mom! Dad!’
Footsteps. A little
humming sound. The attic-lock melted. The door opened. Mink peered inside,
tall blue shadows behind
her.
‘Peekaboo,’ said Mink.
The End.
If you enjoyed this story, you can find others at this link here…
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
This is a most excellent poem. In “Ozymandias,” Shelley describes a crumbling statue of Ozymandias as a way to portray the transience of political power and to praise art’s power of preserving the past. I offer the readers to send a copy of it to their Congressman, as a reminder of their role in the larger picture of life and the universe.
I met a traveler from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
If you liked this post, you can find other similar posts on this link here. It will take you to an index of similar posts of the same general venue.
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
This is the kind of short science fiction story that I enjoyed reading as a young teenager. A spaceship is out, far out, in deep space. As it crosses the deep depths it discovers a mystery... one that needs investigation. So they check it out, and an adventure ensues...
The Long Way Home
When Marty first saw
the thing it was nearly dead ahead, half a million miles away, a tiny
green blip that repeated itself every five seconds on the screen of his
distant-search radar.
He was four billion
miles from Sol and heading out, working his way slowly through a small
swarm of rock chunks that swung in a slow sun-orbit out here beyond
Pluto, looking for valuable minerals in concentration that would make
mining profitable.
The thing on his
radar screen looked quite small, and therefore not too promising. But,
as it was almost in his path, no great effort would be required to
investigate. For all he knew, it might be solid germanium. And nothing
better was in sight at the moment. Marty leaned back in the control seat
and said: “We’ve got one coming up, baby.” He had no need to address
himself any more exactly. Only one other human was aboard the Clementine, or, to his knowledge, within a couple of billion miles.
Laura’s voice answered through a speaker, from the kitchen two decks below. “Oh, close? Have we got time for breakfast?”
Marty studied the
radar. “About five hours if we maintain speed. Hope it won’t be a waste
of energy to decelerate and look the thing over.” He gave Clem’s main computer the problem of finding the most economical engine use to approach his find and reach zero velocity relative to it.
“Come and eat!”
“All right.” He and
the computer studied the blip together for a few seconds. Then the man,
not considering it anything of unusual importance, left the control room
to have breakfast with his bride of three months. As he walked
downstairs in the steadilymaintained artificial gravity, he heard the
engines starting.
Ten hours later he
examined his new find much more closely, with a rapidly focusing
alertness that balanced between an explorer’s caution and a prospector’s
elation at a possibly huge strike. The incredible shape of X, becoming
apparent as the Clem drew within a few hundred miles, was what
had Marty on the edge of his chair. It was a needle thirty miles long,
as near as his radar could measure and about a hundred yards
thick—dimensions that matched exactly nothing Marty could expect to find
anywhere in space.
It was obviously no
random chunk of rock. And it was no spaceship that he had ever seen or
heard of. One end of it pointed in the direction of Sol, causing him to
suggest to Laura the idea of a miniature comet, complete with tail. She
took him seriously at first, then remembered some facts about comets and
swatted him playfully. “Oh, you!” she said.
Another, more real
possibility quickly became obvious, with sobering effect. The ancient
fear of aliens that had haunted Earthmen through almost three thousand
years of intermittent space exploration, a fear that had never been
realized, now peered into the snug control room through the green radar
eye.
Aliens were always
good for a joke when spacemen met and talked. But they turned out to be
not particularly amusing when you were possibly confronting them,
several billion miles from Earth. Especially, thought Marty, in a ship
built for robot mining, ore refining, and hauling, not for diplomatic
contacts or heroics—and with the only human assistance a girl on her
first space trip. Marty hardly felt up to speaking for the human race in
such a situation.
It took a minute to set the autopilot so that any sudden move by X would trigger alarms and such evasive tactics as Clem could
manage. He then set a robot librarian to searching his microfilm files
for any reference to a spaceship having X’s incredible dimensions.
There was a
chance—how good a chance, he found hard to estimate, when any
explanation looked somewhat wild—that X was a derelict, the wrecked hull
of some ship dead for a decade, or a century, or a thousand years. By
laws of salvage, such a find would belong to him if he towed it into
port. The value might be very high or very low. But the prospect was
certainly intriguing.
Marty brought Clem to a stop relative to X, and noticed that his velocity to Sol now also hung at zero. “I wonder,” he muttered,
“Space anchor . . . ?”
The space anchor had
been in use for thousands of years. It was a device that enabled a ship
to fasten itself to a particular point in the gravitational field of a
massive body such as a sun. If X was anchored, it did not prove that
there was still life aboard her; once “dropped,” an anchor could hold as
long as a hull could last. Laura brought sandwiches and a hot drink to
him in the control room.
“If we call the navy
and they bring it in we won’t get anything out of it,” he told her
between bites. “That’s assuming it’s—not alien.”
“Could there be someone alive on it?” She was staring into the screen. Her face was solemn, but, he thought, not frightened.
“If it’s human, you mean? No. I know there
hasn’t been any ship remotely like that used in recent years. Way, way
back the Old Empire built some that were even bigger, but none I ever
heard of with this crazy shape . . . “
The robot librarian
indicated that it had drawn a blank. “See?” said Marty. “And I’ve even
got most of the ancient types in there.” There was silence for a little
while. The evening’s recorded music started somewhere in the background.
“What would you do if I weren’t along?” Laura asked him.
He did not answer
directly, but said something he had been considering. “I don’t know the
psychology of our hypothetical aliens. But it seems to me that if you
set out exploring new solar systems, you do as Earthmen have always
done—go with the best you have in the way of speed and weapons.
Therefore if X is alien, I don’t think Clem would stand a chance trying to fight or run.” He paused, frowning at the image of X. “That damned shape—it’s just not right for anything.”
“We could call the
navy—not that I’m saying we should, darling,” she added hastily. “You
decide, and I’ll never complain either way. I’m just trying to help you
think it out.”
He looked at her, believed it about there never being any complaints, and squeezed her hand. Anything more seemed superfluous.
“If I was alone,” he
said, “I’d jump into a suit, go look that thing over, haul it back to
Ganymede, and sell it for a unique whateverit-is. Maybe I’d make enough
money to marry you in real style, and trade in Clem for a
first-rate ship—or maybe even terraform an asteroid and keep a couple of
robot prospectors. I don’t know, though. Maybe we’d better call the
navy.”
She laughed at him
gently. “We’re married enough already, and we had all the style I
wanted. Besides, I don’t think either of us would be very happy sitting
on an asteroid. How long do you think it will take you to look it over?”
At the airlock door she had misgivings: “Oh, it is safe enough, isn’t it? Marty, be careful and come back soon.” She kissed him before he closed his helmet.
They had moved Clem to
within a few kilometers of X. Marty mounted his spacebike and
approached it slowly, from the side. The vast length of X blotted out a
thin strip of stars to his right and left, as it it were the distant
shore of some vast island in a placid Terran sea, and the starclouds
below him were the watery reflections of the ones above. But space was
too black to permit such an illusion to endure.
The tiny FM radar on
his bike showed him within three hundred yards of X. He killed his
forward speed with a gentle application of retrojets and turned on a
spotlight. Bright metal gleamed smoothly back at him as he swung the
beam from side to side. Then he stopped it where a dark concavity showed
up.
“Lifeboat berth . . . empty,” he said aloud, looking through the bike’s little telescope.
“Then it is a derelict? We’re all right?” asked Laura’s voice in his helmet.
“Looks that way.
Yeah, I guess there’s no doubt of it. I’ll go in for a closer look now.”
He eased the bike forward. X was evidently just some rare type of ship
that neither he nor the compilers of the standard reference works in his
library had ever heard of. Which sounded a little foolish to him, but .
. .
At ten meters’
distance he killed speed again, set the bike on automatic stay-clear,
made sure a line from it was fast to his belt, and launched himself out
of the saddle gently, headfirst, toward X.
The armored hands of
his suit touched down first, easily and expertly. In a moment he was
standing upright on the hull, held in place by magnetic boots. He looked
around. He detected no response to his arrival.
Marty turned toward
Sol, sighting down the kilometers of dark cylinder that seemed to
dwindle to a point in the starry distance, like a road on which a man
might travel home toward a tiny sun. Near at hand the hull was smooth,
looking like that of any ordinary spaceship. In the direction away from
Sol, quite distant, he could vaguely see some sort of projections at
right angles to the hull. He mounted his bike again and set off in that
direction. When he neared the nearest projection, a kilometer and a half
down the hull, he saw it to be a sort of enormous clamp that encircled
X—or rather, part of a clamp. It ended a few meters from the hull, in
rounded globs of metal that had once been molten but were now too cold
to affect the thermometer Marty held against them. His radiation counter
showed nothing above the normal background.
“Ah,” said Marty after a moment, looking at the half-clamp.
“Something?”
“I think I’ve got it
figured out. Not quite as weird as we thought. Let me check for one
thing more.” He steered the bike slowly around the circumference of X.
A third of the way
around he came upon what looked like a shallow trench, about five feet
wide and a foot deep, with a bottom that shone cloudy gray in his
lights. It ran lengthwise on X as far as he could see in either
direction.
A door-sized opening
was cut in the clamp above the trench. Marty nodded and smiled to
himself, and gunned the bike around in an accelerating curve that aimed
at the Clementine.
“It’s not a
spaceship at all, only a part of one,” he told Laura a little later,
digging in the microfilm file with his own hands, with the air of a man
who knew what he was looking for. “That’s why the librarian didn’t turn
it up. Now I remember reading about them. It’s part of an Old Empire job
of about two thousand years ago. They used a somewhat different drive
than we do, one that made one enormous ship more economical to run than
several normal-sized ones. They made these ships ready for a voyage by
fastening together long narrow sections side by side, the number
depending on how much cargo they had to move. What we’ve found is
obviously one of those sections.”
Laura wrinkled her
forehead. “It must have been a terrible job, putting those sections
together and separating them, even in free space.”
“They used space
anchors. That trench I mentioned? It has a forcefield bottom. so an
anchor could be sunk through it. Then the whole section could be slid
straight forward or back, in or out of the bunch . . . here, I’ve got
it, I think. Put this strip in the viewer.”
One picture, a
photograph, showed what appeared to be one end of a bunch of long
needles, in a glaring light, against a background of stars that looked
unreal. The legend beneath gave a scanty description of the ship in
flowing Old Empire script. Other pictures showed sections of the ship in
some detail.
“This must be it, all right,” said Marty thoughtfully. “Funny looking old tub.”
“I wonder what happened to wreck her.”
“Drives sometimes
exploded in those days, and that could have done it. And this one
section got anchored to Sol somehow—it’s funny.”
“How long ago did it
happen, do you suppose?” asked Laura. She had her arms folded as if she
were a little cold, though it was not cold in the Clementine.
“Must be around two
thousand years or more. These ships haven’t been used for about that
long.” He picked up a stylus. “I better go over there with a big bag of
tools tomorrow and take a look inside.” He wrote down a few things he
thought he might need.
“Historians would probably pay a good price for the whole thing, untouched,” she suggested, watching him draw doodles.
“That’s a thought.
But maybe there’s something really valuable aboard—though I won’t be
able to give it anything like a thorough search, of course. The thing is
anchored, remember. I’ll probably have to break in, anyway, to release
that.”
She pointed to one
of the diagrams. “Look, a section thirty miles long must be one of the
passenger compartments. And according to this plan, it would have no
drive at all of its own. We’ll have to tow it.”
He looked. “Right. Anyway, I don’t think I’d care to try its drive if it had one.”
He located airlocks on the plan and made himself generally familiar with it.
The next “morning”
found Marty loading extra tools, gadgets, and explosives on his bike.
The trip to X (he still thought of it that way) was uneventful. This
time he landed about a third of the way from one end, where he expected
to find a handy airlock and have a choice of directions to explore when
he got inside. He hoped to get the airlock open without letting out
whatever atmosphere or gas was present in any of the main compartments,
as a sudden drop in pressure might damage something in the unknown
cargo. He found a likely looking spot for entry where the plans had told
him to expect one. It was a small auxiliary airlock, only a few feet
from the space-anchor channel. The forcefield bottom of that channel
was, he knew, useless as a possible doorway. Though anchors could be
raised and lowered through it, they remained partly imbedded in it at
all times. Starting a new hole from scratch would cause the
decompression he was trying to avoid, and possibly a dangerous explosion
as well.
Marty began his
attack on the airlock door cautiously, working with electronic
“sounding” gear for a few minutes, trying to tell if the inner door was
closed as well. He had about decided that it was when something made him
look up. He raised his head and sighted down the dark length of X
toward Sol.
Something was moving toward him along the hull.
He was up in the
bike saddle with his hand on a blaster before he realized what it
was—that moving blur that distorted the stars seen through it, like heat
waves in air. Without doubt, it was a space anchor, moving along the
channel.
Marty rode the
bike out a few yards and nudged it along slowly, following the anchor.
It moved at about the pace of a fast walk. Moved . . . but it was sunk into space.
“Laura,” he called. “Something odd here. Doppler this hull for me and see if it’s moving.”
Laura
acknowledged in one businesslike word. Good girl, he thought. I won’t
have to worry about you. He coasted along the hull on the bike, staying
even with the apparent movement of the anchor.
Laura’s voice came: “It is moving now, toward Sol. About 10 kilometers per hour. Maybe less—it’s so slow it’s hard to read.”
“Good, that’s
what I thought.” He hoped he sounded reassuring. He pondered the
situation. It was the hull moving then, the forcefield channel sliding
by the fixed anchor. Whatever was causing it, it did not seem to be
directed against him or the Clem. “Look, baby,” he went on. “Something peculiar is happening.” He explained about the anchor. “Clem may be no battleship, but I guess she’s a match for any piece of wreckage.”
“But you’re out there!”
“I have to see
this. I never saw anything like it before. Don’t worry, I’ll pull back
if it looks at all dangerous.” Something in the back of his mind told
him to go back to his ship and call the navy. He ignored it without much
trouble. He had never thought much of calling the navy.
About four hours
later the incomprehensible anchor neared the end of its track, within
thirty meters of what seemed to be X’s stern. It slowed down and came to
a gradual stop a few meters from the end of the track. For a minute
nothing else happened. Marty reported the facts to Laura. He sat
straight in the bike saddle, regarding the universe, which offered him
no enlightenment.
In the space
between the anchor and the end of the track, a second patterned shimmer
appeared. It must necessarily have been let “down” into space from
inside X. Marty felt a creeping chill. After a little while the first
anchor vanished, withdrawn through the forcefield into the hull.
Marty sat
watching for twenty minutes, but nothing further happened. He realized
that he had a crushing grip on the bike controls and that he was
quivering with fatigue.
Laura and Marty took turns sleeping and watching, that night aboard the Clementine.
About noon the next ship’s day Laura was at the telescope when anchor
number one reappeared, now at the “prow” of X. After a few moments the
one at the stem vanished. Marty looked at the communicator that he could
use any time to call the navy. Faster-than-light travel not being
practical so near a sun, it would take them at least several hours to
arrive after he decided he needed them. Then he beat his fist against a
table and swore. “It can only be that there’s some kind of mechanism in
her still operating.” He went to the telescope and watched number one
anchor begin its apparent slow journey sternward once more.
“I don’t know. I’ve got to settle this.”
The doppler showed X was again creeping toward Sol at about 10 kilometers an hour.
“Does it seem likely there’d be power left after two thousand years to operate such a mechanism?” Laura asked.
“I think so. Each
passenger section had a hydrogen power lamp.” He dug out the microfilm
again. “Yeah. a small fusion lamp for electricity to light and heat the
section, and to run the emergency equipment for . . .” His voice trailed
off, then continued in a dazed tone: “For recycling food and water.”
“Marty, what is it?”
He stood up,
staring at the plan. “The only radios were in the lifeboats, and the
lifeboats are gone. I wonder . . . sure. The explosion could have torn
them apart, blown them away, so . . .”
“What are you talking about?”
He looked again
at their communicator. “A transmitter that can get through the noise
between here and Pluto wouldn’t be easy to jury-rig, even now. In the
Old Empire days . . . “
“What?”
“Now about air—”
He seemed to wake up with a start, looked at her sheepishly. “Just an
idea that hit me.” He grinned. “I’m making another trip.”
An hour later he
was landing on X for the third time, touching down near the “stern.” He
was riding the moving hull toward the anchor, but it was still many
kilometers away.
The spot he had
picked was near another small auxiliary airlock, upon which he began
work immediately. After ascertaining that the inner door was closed, he
drilled a hole in the outer door to relieve any pressure in the chamber
to keep the outer door shut. The door opening mechanism suffered from
twenty-century cramp, but a vibrator tool shook it loose enough to be
operated by hand. The inside of the airlock looked like nothing more
than the inside of an airlock.
He patched the
hole he had made in the outer door so he would be able—he hoped—to open
the inner one normally. He operated the outer door several times to make
sure he could get out fast if he had to. After attaching a few extras
from the bike to his suit, he said a quick and cheerful goodbye to
Laura—not expecting his radio to work from inside the hull—and closed
himself into the airlock. Using the vibrator again, he was able to work
the control that should let whatever passed for hull atmosphere into the
chamber. It came. His wrist gauge told him pressure was building up to
approximately spaceship normal, and his suit mikes began to pick up a
faint hollow humming from somewhere. He very definitely kept suit and
helmet sealed.
The inner door
worked perfectly, testifying to the skill of the Old Empire builders.
Marty found himself nearly upside down as he went through, losing his
footing and his sense of heroic adventure. In return he gained the
knowledge that X’s artificial gravity was still at least partly
operational. Righting himself, he found that he was in a small anteroom
banked with spacesuit lockers, now illuminated only by his suit lights
but showing no other signs of damage. There was a door in each of the
other walls.
He moved to try
the one at his right. First drawing his blaster, he hesitated a moment,
then slid it back into its holster. Swallowing, he eased the door open
to find only another empty compartment, about the size of an average
room and stripped of everything down to the bare deck and bulkheads.
Another door led
him into a narrow passage where a few overhead lights burned dimly.
Trying to watch over his shoulder and ahead at the same time, he
followed the hall to a winding stair and began to climb, moving with all
the silence possible in a spacesuit. The stair brought him out onto a
long gallery overlooking what could only be the main corridor of X, a
passage twenty meters wide and three decks high; it narrowed away to a
point in the dimlit distance.
A man came out of a doorway across the corridor, a deck below Marty.
He was an old man
and may have been nearsighted, for he seemed unaware of the spacesuited
figure gripping a railing and staring down at him. The old man wore a
sort of tunic intricately embroidered with threads of different colors,
and well tailored to his thin figure, leaving his legs and feet bare. He
stood for a moment peering down the long corridor, while Marty stared,
momentarily frozen in shock.
Marty pulled back
two slow steps from the railing, to where he stood mostly in shadow.
Turning his head to follow the old man’s gaze, he noticed that the
forcefield where the anchors traveled was visible, running in a sunken
strip down the center of the corridor. When the interstellar ship of
which X was once a part had been in normal use, the strip might have
been covered with a moving walkway of some kind.
The old man
turned his attention to a tank where grew a mass of plants with flat,
dark green leaves. He touched a leaf, then turned a valve that doled
water into the tank from a thin pipe. Similar valves were clustered on
the bulkhead behind the old man, and pipes ran from them to many other
plant-filled tanks set at intervals down the corridor. “For oxygen,”
Marty said aloud in an almost calm voice, and was startled at the sound
in his helmet. His helmet airspeaker was not turned on, so of course the
old man did not hear him. The old man pulled a red berry from one of
the plants and ate it absently.
Marty made a move
with his chin to turn on his speaker, but did not complete. He half
lifted his arms to wave, but fear of the not-understood held him, made
him back up slowly into the shadows at the rear of the gallery. Turning
his head to the right he could see the near end of the corridor, and an
anchor there, not sunken in space but raised almost out of the
forcefield on a framework at the end of the strip.
Near the stair he
had ascended was a half-open door, leading into darkness. Marty
realized he had turned off his suit lights without consciously knowing
of it. Moving carefully so the old man would not see, he lit one and
probed the darkness beyond the door cautiously. The room he entered was
the first of a small suite that had once been a passenger cabin. The
furniture was simple, but it was the first of any kind that he had seen
aboard X. Garments hanging in one corner were similar to the old man’s
tunic, though no two were exactly alike in design. Marty fingered the
fabric with one armored hand, holding it close to his faceplate. He
nodded to himself; it seemed to be the kind of stuff produced by
fiberrecycling machinery, and he doubted very much that it was anywhere
near two thousand years old.
Marty emerged
from the doorway of the little apartment, and stood in shadow with his
suit lights out, looking around. The old man had disappeared. He
remembered that the old man had gazed down the infinite-looking corridor
as if expecting something. There was nothing new in sight that way. He
turned up the gain of one of his suit mikes and focused it in that
direction.
Many human voices
were singing, somewhere down there, miles away. He started, and tried
to interpret what he heard in some other way, but with an eerie thrill,
he became convinced that his first impression was correct. While he
studied a plan of going back to his bike and heading in that direction,
he became aware that the singing was getting louder—and therefore, no
doubt closer.
He leaned back
against the bulkhead in the shadow at the rear of the gallery. His suit,
dark-colored for space work far from Sol, would be practically
invisible from the lighted corridor below, while he could see down with
little difficulty. Part of his mind urged him to go back to Laura, to
call the navy, because these unknown people could be dangerous to him.
But he had to wait and see more of them. He grinned wryly as he realized
that he was not going to get any salvage out of X after all.
Sweating in spite
of his suit’s coolers, he listened to the singing grow rapidly louder
in his helmet. Male and female voices rose and fell in an intricate
melody, sometimes blending, sometimes chanting separate parts. The
language was unknown to him. Suddenly the people were in sight, first
only as a faint dot of color in the distance. As they drew nearer he
could see that they walked in a long neat column eight abreast, four on
each side of the central strip of forcefield. Men and women, apparently
teamed according to no fixed rule of age or sex or size—except that he
saw no oldsters or young children.
The people sang
and leaned forward as they walked, pulling their weight on heavy ropes
that were intricately decorated, like their clothing and that of the old
man who had now stepped out of his doorway again to greet them. A few
other oldsters of both sexes appeared near him to stand and wait.
Through a briefly opened door Marty caught a glimpse of a well-lighted
room holding machines he recognized as looms only because of the
halffinished cloth they held. He shook his head wonderingly.
All at once the
walkers were very near; hundreds of people pulling on ropes that led to a
multiple whiffletree, made of twisted metal pipes, that rode over the
central trench. The whiffletree and the space anchor to which it was
fastened were pulled past Marty—or rather the spot from which he watched
was carried past the fixed anchor by the slow, human-powered thrust of X
toward Sol.
Behind the anchor
came a small group of children, from about the age of ten up to
puberty. They pulled on ropes, drawing a cart that held what looked like
containers for food and water. At the extreme rear of the procession
marched a man in the prime of life, tall and athletic, wearing a
magnificent headdress.
About the time he
drew even with Marty, this man stopped suddenly and uttered a sharp
command. Instantly, the pulling and singing ceased. Several men nearest
the whiffletree moved in and loosened it from the anchor with quick
precision. Others held the slackened ropes clear as the enormous inertia
of X’s mass carried the end of the forcefield strip toward the anchor,
which now jammed against the framework holding anchor number two,
forcing the framework back where there had seemed to be no room. A thick
forcefield pad now became visible to Marty behind the framework,
expanding steadily as it absorbed the energy of the powerful stress
between ship and anchor. Conduits of some kind, Marty saw, led away from
the pad, possibly to where energy might be stored for use when it came
time to start X creeping toward the sun again. A woman in a headdress
now mounted the framework and released anchor number two, to drop into
space “below” the hull and bind X fast to the place where it was now
held by anchor number one. A crew of men came forward and began to raise
anchor number one . . .
He found himself
descending the stair, retracing his steps to the airlock. Behind him the
voices of the people were raised in a steady recitation that might have
been a prayer. Feeling somewhat as if he moved in a dream, he made no
particular attempt at caution, but he met no one. He tried to think, to
understand what he had witnessed. Vaguely, comprehension came.
Outside, he said:
“I’m out all right, Laura. I want to look at something at the other
end, and then I’ll come home.” He scarcely heard what she said in reply,
but realized that her answer had been almost instantaneous; she must
have been listening steadily for his call all the time. He felt better.
The bike shot him
50 kilometers down the dreamlike length of X toward Sol in a few
minutes. A lot faster than the people inside do their traveling, he
thought . . . and Sol was dim ahead.
Almost recklessly
he broke into X again, through an airlock near the prow. At this end of
the forcefield strip hung a gigantic block and tackle that would give a
vast mechanical advantage to a few hundred people pulling against an
anchor, when it came time for them to start the massive hull moving
toward Sol once more.
He looked in
almost unnoticed at a nursery, small children in the care of a few
women. He thought one of the babies saw him and laughed at him as he
watched through a hole in a bulkhead where a conduit had once passed.
“What is it?” asked Laura impatiently as he stepped exhausted out of the shower room aboard the Clem, wrapping a robe around him. He could see his shock suddenly mirrored in her face.
“People,” he said, sitting down. “Alive over there. Earth people. Humans.”
“You’re all right?”
“Sure. It’s
just—God!” He told her about it briefly. “They must be descended from
the survivors of the accident, whatever it was. Physically, there’s no
reason why they couldn’t live when you come to think of it—even
reproduce, up to a limited number. Plants for oxygen—I bet their air’s
as good as ours. Recycling equipment for food and water, and the
hydrogen power lamp still working to run it, and to give them light and
gravity . . . they have about everything they need. Everything but a
space-drive.” He leaned back with a sigh and closed his eyes. It was
hard for him to stop talking to her. She was silent for a little, trying
to assimilate it all. “But if they have hydrogen power, couldn’t they
have rigged something?” she finally asked. “Some kind of a drive, even if it was slow? Just one push and they’d keep moving.”
Marty thought it
over. “Moving a little faster won’t help them.” He sat up and opened his
eyes again. “And they’d have a lot less work to do every day. I imagine
too large a dose of leisure time could be fatal to all of them.
“Somehow they had
the will to keep going, and the intelligence to find a way—to evolve a
system of life that worked for them, that kept them from going wild and
killing each other. And their children, and their grandchildren, and
after that . . . ” Slowly he stood up. She followed him into the control
room, where they stood watching the image of X that was still focused
on the telescope screen.
“All those years,” Laura whispered. “All that time.”
“Do you realize
what they’re doing?” he asked softly. “They’re not just surviving,
turned inward on weaving and designing and music.
“In a few hours
they’re going to get up and start another day’s work. They’re going to
pull anchor number one back to the front of their ship and lower it.
That’s their morning job. Then someone left in the rear will raise
anchor number two. Then the main group will start pulling against number
one, as I saw them doing a little while ago, and their ship will begin
to move toward Sol. Every day they go through this they move about fifty
kilometers closer to home.
“Honey, these
people are walking home and pulling their ship with them. It must be a
religion with them by now, or something very near it . . . ” He put an
arm around Laura.
“Marty—how long would it take them?”
“Space is big,” he said in a flat voice, as if quoting something he had been required to memorize.
After a few
moments he continued. “I said just moving a little faster won’t help
them. Let’s say they’ve traveled 50 kilometers a day for two thousand
years. That’s somewhere near 36 million kilometers. Almost enough to get
from Mars to Earth at their nearest approach. But they’ve got a long
way to go to reach the neighborhood of Mars’ orbit. We’re well out
beyond Pluto here. Practically speaking, they’re just about where they
started from.” He smiled wanly. “Really, they’re not far from home, for
an interstellar ship. They had their accident almost on the doorstep of
their own solar system, and they’ve been walking toward the threshold
ever since.”
Laura went to the communicator and began to set it up for the call that would bring the navy within a few hours. She paused.
“How long would it take them now,” she asked, “to get somewhere near Earth?”
“Hell would
freeze over. But they can’t know that anymore. Or maybe they still know
it and it just doesn’t bother them. They must just go on, tugging at
that damned anchor day after day, year after year, with maybe a holiday
now and then . . . I don’t know how they do it. They work and sing and
feel they’re accomplishing something . . . and really, they are, you
know. They have a goal and they are moving toward it. I wonder what they
say of Earth, how they think about it?”
Slowly Laura continued to set up the communicator.
Marty watched her. “Are you sure?” he pleaded suddenly.
“What are we doing to them?”
But she had already sent the call.
For better or worse, the long voyage was almost over.
The End
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
Poetry
My Poetry
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
This is a poem that I memorized in First Grade. I hated the memorization of poems, and cried and protested, to no avail. Later, when I was much older, I began to appreciate this memorization. Not only did it give me an appreciation of English language, but also of art and beauty.
The sound of a poem, even when it isn’t read out loud, comes through with repetition. The beauty of a poem, even when it’s not accompanied by a picture, comes through with imagery. And the meaning of a poem, even if it’s not about us, comes through when the writer makes it personal.
-Awesome Stories
I have an intern who is in her Masters studying English. She never heard of this poem or the poet. Can you believe that? What is she learning instead?
I do not know.
The poem “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost
Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village, though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound’s the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
Poetry
My Poetry
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
I have an intern that works for me. She is currently studying for her Master’s in English. I have her performing some Marketing research for me, and she is doing a reasonable job. One of the things that surprised me was that she couldn’t recite any poetry.
None.
Not one poem.
That really surprised me. As I was memorizing poems since first grade.
Nor was she familiar with any of the poet or classical authors that I named. She was absolutely unfamiliar with all of them.
She didn’t know who Jane Austen was, who William Blake was, or Charles Dickens. She never read any of their works, or had no idea what I was talking about when I referenced their stories.
What, in good-God’s name, are they teaching in schools today?
So I recited this poem to her. She was surprised [1] that I had had memorized it and could recite it, and [2] that it was meaningful and had significance and application in her life.
Let’s not let these masterpieces be erased in a tsunami of political correctness. Let’s treasure the good, and discard the bad, and let us all take the road not taken…
TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Related Comment
Coincidentally, I found this gem in my LinkedIN feed today. Yes, everyone should read and know the classics. Especially those studying Literature and English.
Fictional Story Related Index
This is an index of full text reprints of stories that I have
read that influenced me when I was young. They are rather difficult to
come by today, as where I live they are nearly impossible to find. Yes,
you can find them on the internet, behind paywalls. Ah, that’s why all
those software engineers in California make all that money. Well, here
they are FOR FREE. Enjoy reading them.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
My Poetry
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Hennig Brand was obsessed with discovering the philosopher’s stone.
Alternatively known as the elixir of life, the philosopher’s stone
promised its finder eternal life and the ability to turn common metals
into gold.
Brand grew to believe that human urine offered a gateway to the
elixir of life. This was typical alchemical thinking – alchemists hoped
to better understand eternal life through studying the properties of
body fluids.
Brand collected thousands of liters of urine from his neighbors.
Although someone doing this today would probably be regarded as screwy,
it was a common practice to collect urine in earlier times – it had
plenty of uses, such as fertilizing crops, softening leather, and
cleaning your teeth!
In 1669, in Hamburg, Brand evaporated the urine he collected to yield
a black sludge. He left this to mature until worms started appearing in
it. He heated the sludge with sand, yielding hot gases and oils, which
he condensed using cold water. The final substance to condense was a
white solid. This was phosphorus. (Human urine contains significant
quantities of dissolved phosphates.)
At first Brand called the remarkable new substance ‘cold fire’
because it glowed in the dark. He then named it phosphorus, which is
Greek for ‘bringer of light.’ He was the first named person in history
to discover a new chemical element.
The image herein was painted long after Brand’s lifetime by the British artist Joseph Wright in 1771. Its wordy title is: The Alchymist, in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone, Discovers Phosphorus, and prays for the successful Conclusion of his operation, as was the custom of the Ancient Chymical Astrologers. The painting shows white phosphorus glowing with exaggerated intensity. White phosphorus naturally produces a rather dim green glow.
I find this work of art amazing.
Art Related Index
This is an index of art that I have found profound, interesting,
beautiful or enlightening. In any event, I find that art soothes my
soul. I enjoy painting figurative and portraits in oils using the more
traditional Flemish technique, but it never really brought me the kind
of money I need to live off of. Such is the life of a painter today.
Please enjoy.
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Kai Carpenter is a freelance illustrator and painter based in New York, United States who has created magnificent artworks with traditional gouache painting… His list of clients includes Wizards of the Coast, LEGO Systems, Anderson Design Group, and Harper Collins publishing. Let’s take a look at some of his amazing artworks styled in an Art Deco flair, these adventurous scenes are sure to inspire and bring a smile.
Kai Carpenter’s elegiac scenes mine the myth and history coursing beneath the whole of human consciousness. Occupying the nebulous space between waking and dreams, his subjects hover just at the edge of our collective understanding.
Like figures emerging from mist, they are both seen and unseen, their presence more intuited than perceived. Carpenter’s portrayal of nature and the human form harkens back to the very roots of Western culture.
He embraces the ideals of the Romantic, offering art as a conduit through which we are meant to both contemplate and celebrate the mysteries of life.
W hen it came to painting of Redwood National Park for an ambitious centennial art book, Kai Carpenter decided to “turn the saturation way up”—use bright exaggerated colors—with his palette of oil paints.
The Brooklyn-based illustrator hadn’t set foot in the park, but had been commissioned to paint a stylized rendition of it, along with 11 other parks.
After speaking with people who had been there and studied photos of the park, Carpenter thought a bold color scheme would convey the sheer size of the place. He conjured a giant redwood, drenched in red and burgundy, towering above two small travelers, with more giant trunks receding into the background.
“I was going for the look of old lithographs with those great color palettes,” he says. He referred to the early 20th century art deco travel posters, which featured happy couples exploring Technicolor versions of far-off locales: Visit Fascinating Fiji! Fly with Trans World Airlines! “And I was taking a lot of cues from the parks themselves, they’re already so vibrant.”
Five years ago, Joel decided he wanted to pay homage to the iconic Works Progress Administration posters, created between 1938 and 1941 for 14 national parks to encourage Americans to explore the great outdoors.
He started recruiting artists he’d worked with through his Nashville firm, Anderson Design Group, who generally specialize in that retro travel poster style. To achieve that look, most ADG art is hand-lettered and drawn or painted before it’s given a final polish on the computer.
“We studied the WPA posters to make sure we were plowing new ground,” Joel says. “Luckily, the parks are so vast that it wasn’t hard to find new landscapes and color palettes.”
All 71 works in the book draw from styles that characterize the Golden Age of Poster Art: rich colors, hand-lettered text, timeless scenes like a cowboy in Saguaro National Park or a couple canoeing through the Everglades.
Three weeks after completing all of the paintings in September, Carpenter and his older brother road-tripped from Brooklyn to Seattle, stopping over two weeks at three of the parks he’d painted: Zion, Yosemite, and Redwood.
“I was worried I was going to be devastated that I butchered all of these places,” he says. “But I was surprisingly happy with how they turned out.” Especially the Redwood poster: “I’m really glad that I went bananas with the colors,” Carpenter says. “It feels that way when you’re there. Like you’re maybe seeing something you’re a little too small to be seeing.”
The Seattle-based Carpenter’s work is jam-packed with color and storytelling, so much so that you might assume these works are digitally created. However each one is effortlessly painted in oil on canvas.
Inspired by a collection of vintage citrus labels…
… reflect the art styles seen throughout 1900-1950 with an influence of the Works Progress Administration.
This period included persuading Americans to travel to the great outdoors as advertised by the automobile and railroad industries, and later influenced by the art boom of the depression.
Early advertising posters from the 20th Century were pasted onto walls to grab public attention as busy people passed by. By necessity, good poster composition included bold color, contrast, iconic imagery and easy-to-read type.
This is an index of art that I have found profound, interesting,
beautiful or enlightening. In any event, I find that art soothes my
soul. I enjoy painting figurative and portraits in oils using the more
traditional Flemish technique, but it never really brought me the kind
of money I need to live off of. Such is the life of a painter today.
Please enjoy.
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
What is the hottest song in China right now? Apparently, a little rap song called Wolf Disco has been making waves, with its take on what life was like in the late ’90s and early 2000s in China. Journalist Yew Lun Tian (from ThinkChina) is reminded of her own teenage years, as she delves into what makes this song so popular.
Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.
Wolf Disco by Gem is the hottest song in China this year. (At least according to sohu.com.)
A
Singaporean friend recently asked me about this year’s hottest song in
China. And a friend from China quickly shouted out the answer: “Wolf
Disco (野狼 Disco)!”
The song gets in your head with its refreshing blend of Cantonese singing, dialogue in northeastern dialect, and Mandarin rap.
I felt really out of touch, and checked out the song as soon as I got
home. I listened to it once — and was hooked. I wanted to hear it again
and again. No cliched description could do justice to the penetrating
power of this cutting edge cultural icon. A netizen put it well: “This
is an amazing song that gets to your head and heart, and leaves you
wanting more.”
Wolf Disco by Dong Baoshi, stage name Gem, describes a man (“Uncle”)
hitting the dance floor, showing off and trying to pick up young girls
at the disco, circa late ’90s to early 2000s. The song gets in your head
with its refreshing blend of Cantonese singing, dialogue in
northeastern dialect, and Mandarin rap. Gem’s earnest but seriously
inaccurate Cantonese pronunciation when singing “Flower of my heart, I
wanna take you home” is especially funny, as he nails the endearing side
of mainland Chinese when they try their hardest to sing Cantonese songs
despite being no good at the language.
The
song’s catchy beat and easy but evocative lyrics get people hooked; you
just feel like dancing along. “To the left, draw a rainbow/and to your
right, draw a dragon”; “Everybody put your head down/both hands to the
front, wave them around”; “Hands to your head, move your hips/like
you’re fretting”.
For the mainland Chinese audience who exercised en masse in primary school, went for social dances as adults, and joined square dances in the neighborhood during their twilight years, those lines would be somewhat uncanny. Listening to Wolf Disco is more satisfying than watching Psy’s Gangnam Style. No wonder some netizens say their three- or four-year-old kids have Wolf Disco as their morning alarm.
The song does not avoid or overuse the Hong Kong element, but uses it to just the right degree for entertainment purposes, while not being political.
With its brand of nostalgia, the song touches the hearts of the older
crowd. The imagery of the dance hall and the references to Hong Kong
popular culture capture the collective memories of a generation of
mainland Chinese, as well as Chinese in the Greater China diaspora,
including myself. “Slicked back hair, beeper call, 007 on the dance
floor/Northeast b-boys in the house”, conjures up the hairstyles,
beepers (known as pagers in Singapore), and dance moves of the time,
while “Aaron Kwok hands across your chest” brought me back in a second
to my pimple-faced days, singing and dancing along to his hit song Love
You Endlessly (《对你爱不完》).
Many years ago, the hip young people in northeast China had their fun
in entertainment joints that played Cantonese songs; big shots found
triad bosses in Hong Kong movies cool, like the way Uncle “feels like
Tony Leung in Infernal Affairs” (see note below) when picking up girls.
When Gem was producing Wolf Disco, Hong Kong was not yet in
full-blown chaos. The song does not avoid or overuse the Hong Kong
element, but uses it to just the right degree for entertainment
purposes, while not being political. For example, just as Deng Xiaoping
previously declared “horses keep running, carry on dancing” to say
nothing will change under “one country, two systems”, Uncle says “the
song keeps playing, carry on dancing” to hide his embarrassment at
failing to pick up girls.
Wolf Disco is so popular not just because it brings together borrowed
elements from Hong Kong and Western music genres such as rap, but
because it uses these external elements to authentically tell the story
of a young person from northeast China. Gem calls this combination
“garlic-flavoured vaporwave” — vaporwave is a Western music subgenre
that combines ’80s and ’90s music with electronic sounds.
Many netizens say the epitome of cheesiness is authenticity, and they are moved by the song’s depiction of a young person who does not lose their authenticity.
And then, while most people would take off their jackets when hitting
the dance floor, Uncle’s “leather jacket stays on, don’t matter the
heat”. In an interview with GQ, Gem explained that in northeast China, a
leather jacket is cool, and a symbol of manhood. Some people only have
that one presentable item of clothing — you can be wearing rags on the
inside, but the outside has to look smart. This shows the face-loving
quality of people from northeast China, and how tough it was for them
when the economy in northeast China cooled down.
Many artistic elites have analyzed this phenomenal song and noted the concept of a “cheesy high” (土嗨); the presentation and/or content may be cheesy, but it still gets people high. Many netizens say the epitome of cheesiness is authenticity, and they are moved by the song’s depiction of a young person who does not lose their authenticity.
The way I see it, while many people go to high-end bookstores and restaurants and share photos with friends to hint that they are more westernized, artistic, and sophisticated, it works better to be plainly and unabashedly cheesy. While many stores try and attract customers with empty sales pitches, people like it better when one is not shy to show and laugh at their own lack of sophistication. When people are swept up by globalization and get nervous or anxious that their foreign language skills are inadequate, it is extremely satisfying to hear the language of one’s hometown loud and proud on the big stage.
In 2019, a year of anniversaries, official publicity is full of big
stories and lofty emotions, people would welcome a bit of
unsophisticated, ordinary food for the soul.
Download the full MV
Here is the full music video of this song. It is subtitled in English and Cantonese. And it is an enjoyable video that tells the story of a young man’s dreams in NE China. It’s around 40-something MB, so grab a beer and let it download in full.
心里的花我想要带妳回家
Flower of my heart, I wanna take you home
在那深夜酒吧哪管它是真是假
In the late night bar, don’t matter if it’s real or fake
请妳尽情摇摆忘记钟意的他
Sway your body, forget the one you love
妳是最迷人噶 妳知道吗
You’ve caught my eye, don’t you know
这是最好的节拍 这是最爱的节拍
Here comes the beat, it’s the best, the favorite
前面儿哪里来的大井盖 我拿脚往里踹
Is that a manhole cover? Gonna kick it aside
如此动感的节拍 非得搁门口耍帅
I’m feeling the beat, just look cool outside the door
我蹦迪的动线上面儿怎么能有障碍
Clear the way, I’m heading to the floor
大背头 bb机 舞池里的007
Slicked back hair, beeper call, 007 on the dance floor
东北初代霹雳弟 dj瞅我也摇旗
Northeast b-boys in the house, DJ staring, I’m trippin’
不管多热都不能脱下我的皮大衣
Leather jacket stays on, don’t matter the heat
全场动作必须跟我整齐划壹
Everybody gotta follow my moves
来 左边 跟我一起画个龙
To the left, draw a dragon
在妳右边 画一道彩虹
To your right, draw a rainbow
来 左边 跟我一起画彩虹
To the left, draw a rainbow
在妳右边 再画个龙
And to your right, draw a dragon
在妳胸口上比划一个郭富城
Aaron Kwok hands across your chest
左边儿右边儿摇摇头
To the left, to the right, just shake your head
两个食指就像两个钻天猴
Two fingers like sky rockets
指向闪耀的灯球
Point ’em at the disco ball
心里的花我想要带妳回家
Flower of my heart, I wanna take you home
在那深夜酒吧哪管它是真是假
In the late night bar, don’t matter if you’re real or fake
请妳尽情摇摆忘记钟意的他
Sway your body, forget the one you love
妳是最迷人噶 妳知道吗
You’re the hottest, don’t you know
玩儿归玩 闹归闹 别拿蹦迪开玩笑
Play around, mess around, but get serious when you’re dancing
左手一晃真像样 右手霹雳手套
Wave my left hand, glove on my right
金曲野人的士高都给我往后稍一稍
Disco savages take a step back
没事儿不要联系我 大哥大这没信号
Don’t be calling me, no signal on my bigass phone
小皮裙 大波浪 跳起舞来真像样
Leather mini skirt, major curves, looking so fine with her moves
喷的香水太香 好想和她唠一唠
Her perfume delicious, wanna get up close
感觉自己好像梁朝伟在演无间道
Feeling like Tony Leung in Infernal Affairs
万万没想到她让我找个镜子照一照
She tells me to look in a mirror, major burn
手照摇 舞照跳
My hands keep waving, carry on dancing
假装啥也不知道
Act like I know nothing
没有事 没有事 看着天空笑壹笑
I’m fine, I’m fine, I smile up at the sky
使劲儿扒了扒了前面儿的士高的小黄毛儿
Slapping the disco noob in front of me
气质再次完全被我卡死别跟我闹
Throwing all my shade on him, don’t mess with me
来 全场 一起跟我 低下头儿
C’mon everybody put your head down
左手右手往前游
Both hands to the front, wave them around
捂住脑门儿晃动妳的垮垮轴
Hands to your head, move your hips
好像有事儿在发愁
Like you’re fretting
心里的花我想要带妳回家
Flower of my heart, I wanna take you home
在那深夜酒吧哪管它是真是假
In the late night bar, don’t matter if you’re real or fake
请妳尽情摇摆忘记钟意的他
Sway your body, forget the one you love
妳是最迷人噶 妳知道吗
You’re the hottest, don’t you know
来 左边 跟我一起画个龙
To the left, draw a dragon
在妳右边 画一道彩虹
To your right, draw a rainbow
来 左边 跟我一起画彩虹
To the left, draw a rainbow
在妳右边 再画个龙
And to your right, draw a dragon
在妳胸口上比划一个郭富城
Aaron Kwok hands across your chest
左边儿右边儿摇摇头
To the left, to the right, just shake your head
两个食指就像两个钻天猴
Two fingers like sky rockets
指向闪耀的灯球
Point ’em at the disco ball
来 全场 一起跟我 低下头儿
C’mon everybody put your head down
左手右手往前游
Both hands to the front, wave them around
捂住脑门儿晃动妳的垮垮轴
Hands to your head, move your hips
好像有事儿在发愁
Like you’re fretting
时时刻刻妳必须提醒妳自己
You gotta tell yourself
不能搭讪
Not to get friendly
搭讪妳就破功了 老弟
Otherwise you’re a goner, buddy
Links about China
Here are
some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader,
might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.
China and America Comparisons
As an
American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United
States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.
The Chinese Business KTV Experience
This is
the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the
British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal
press. This is the reality. Read or not.
Learning About China
Who
doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what
China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in
China.
Contemporaneous Chinese Music
This is a
series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It
is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I
am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series
of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and
enjoyment.
Parks in China
The parks
in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very
mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.
Really Strange China
Here are
some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem
odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events,
while others are just representative of the differences in culture.
What is China like?
The
purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world,
outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they
might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank
you.
And while
America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources,
and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has
done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and
you can see this in their day-to-day lives.
Summer in Asia
Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…
Some Fun Videos
Here’s a collection of some fun videos taken all over Asia. While
there are many videos taken in China, we also have some taken in
Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea and Japan as well. It’s all in fun.
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
Kayla Mahaffey “KaylaMay” is a Chicago based artist specializing in illustration and fine art. In 2012, she attended the American Academy of Art where she gained knowledge and strengthened her skills.
Her work speaks about how living in our world can be tough and how making the best of it can simply be done by holding on to each other.
Her inspiration is the world around her and her colorful paintings contain hints of whimsy and realism that tell a story of inner thoughts and society issues that sometimes go unheard. Being born and raised on the South side of Chicago, only ignited her love for all things art.
Seeing the struggle and the support from the community made her work evolve to a concept that is personal to her. She continues to further her technique and creativity in her field in order to paint a beautiful picture of a new world for those who live in it.
‘Off to the Races’ narrates the ever-changing road of life. As we travel through life we experience the daily trials and tribulations that help shape us into the people we are today. During this journey we may end up hitting some bumps or may experience some rough terrain, but it’s how we deal with those situations that make the difference.
We are all on the journey to greatness, each individual racing to the finish line in hope of reaching goals and prosperity. With the race may come with it mistakes and regret, but not taking part in the race leads you nowhere.
Playful portraits by Chicago-based artist and illustrator Kayla
Mahaffey. Using a combination of whimsy and realism, Mahaffey explores
the inner thoughts and personal issues that so often go unheard,
creating work that reflects both the struggle and support she sees
within her own community:
“Living in our society can be tough and most of the time we have
to make the best of it. A wild imagination can take you so far, but at
the end of the day we need to realize and observe the world around us.
And the world around us is where I find my inspiration to paint.”
Her work speaks about how living in our world can be tough and how
making the best of it can simply be done by holding on to each other.
This is an index of art that I have found profound, interesting,
beautiful or enlightening. In any event, I find that art soothes my
soul. I enjoy painting figurative and portraits in oils using the more
traditional Flemish technique, but it never really brought me the kind
of money I need to live off of. Such is the life of a painter today.
Please enjoy.
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Kisung Koh uses his art as a means to opening gateways into nature’s spiritual dimensions, exploring the intimate connections he has formulated with wildlife during his lifetime. Over the course of years, this South Korean has had the honor of coming in close contact with many wild animals within their natural habitats and has become aware of these incredibly strong energies.
“I love animals and natures like anyone else and they are all my inspirations. My parents had wanted me to live in somewhere full of trees and the beauties of nature because they knew I was extremely fascinated of being in nature. In my childhood I lived in a small town of South Korea surrounded by mountains and rivers and spent most of the time in nature and farms. “
“One day, I was walking in a forest myself in early morning. It was very silent and calm. While having a nice walk, I had a chance to see a deer family very close. I can’t explain how I felt at the time because it’s unspeakable. It was just truly amazing. “
” It’s probably easier to say that I saw not only deer but also beautiful spirits around them. In my opinion, there is nothing more beautiful than when you actually see a wild animal in nature. However, we rarely see them where they are supposed to be and just don’t know how amazing they are to be alive. “
Kisung Koh (Canada) uses his art to open gateways into nature’s spiritual dimensions and explores the intimate connections he has built with wildlife during his lifetime. Drawing heavily on the memories and dreams provided to him by the sheer awe inspiring spectacles he has witnessed in the great outdoors, Koh pays tribute by creating imagery that is suggestive of the metaphysical energies and bonds which can exist between two living creatures, even when interacting from a distance.
Over the years, Koh has had the honour of coming in close contact with many wild animals in their natural habitats, and has become aware of these energies, which have manifested themselves to him with an ethereal majesty. Through his art, Koh captures the essence and beauty of the natural world, and reminds us that our relationships with it are…
Kisung Koh was born during the year of 1985, in South Korea. He lived in his home country until 2006 when his entire family moved to Toronto, Canada. Based in a new nation with an entirely new culture, Kisung Koh needed some time to adjust. He eventually received a BAA in Illustration from Sheridan College, ON, Canada, receiving these honors in the year of 2012.
Since then, he has been developing his technical skill and establishing a reputation within the art community of Canada.From the moment he became a professional artist, Koh has exhibited his art around the world and has become a much sought after name within the international scene. From day one, he has been finding inspiration in animals and natures, fascinated by their grace and harmony.
Kisung Koh became noticed by art pundits thanks to his dreamy and imaginative places that featured animals, packed with mysterious spirits that make the depicted creatures seem safe. Such a practice culminated over time and is a result of a deep fascination with nature that followed this illustrator his whole life:
There is nothing more beautiful than when you actually see a wild animal in nature. However, we rarely see them from where they are supposed to be and just don’t know how amazing they are to be alive.
Exploring the spiritual potential of the wild and its stoic inhabitants, Koh draws comparable connections between the animal and human plights.
This is an index of art that I have found profound, interesting,
beautiful or enlightening. In any event, I find that art soothes my
soul. I enjoy painting figurative and portraits in oils using the more
traditional Flemish technique, but it never really brought me the kind
of money I need to live off of. Such is the life of a painter today.
Please enjoy.
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Jason Limon
is a painter who has exhibited his artwork in galleries across the U.S.
and in parts of Europe. He has had recent solo exhibitions in New York
City, Chicago and Albuquerque. His current art follows stories based on
mythological creatures and paranormal cryptids portrayed with a hint of
humor with a dose of strangeness. You can often see his characters
brought to life in dimensional form through his complex sculptures.
Jason lives and works in San Antonio, Texas with his wife and two
daughters.
“The main thing that drove me to finding my place in the fine art world was watching and admiring what other artists were doing.”
” I used to spend my days sitting behind a computer working in the graphic design biz and almost every single day I’d scour through illustration annuals and art books we had lying about in shelves and piled on our desks. I was always amazed at the great new things many of these artists were creating.”
” For the longest time it was a place where I always felt I belonged, but was frightened to jump into seeing as I have a family to support and all. Over time these feelings just became stronger and I grew really tired and felt restricted by the computer. “
“I decided to dive in head first in 2007 and began painting full time and all good things just snowballed from there. It’s been a tremendous honor and pleasure to be able to be in the exhibits I’ve been in. I do look forward to seeing what more this avenue has in store for me.” – Jason Limon (Murphy Design)
“Over the last few years when I would lay down to sleep at the end of the day the first thoughts that would run through my head were about death. I’m not a morbid person, nor am I afraid of death. The thoughts were typically quick, then I’d do my best to understand what they meant, but would usually fall asleep before even coming close to an answer.”
“They went on for a little over two years and I noticed just a few months back that they went away. With hindsight and looking at it altogether I took it as a signal to rethink how I express my feelings through art. “
“Most of what I am saying in these paintings is personal and revolve around fear, confusion and the fragility of life – about not having answers and trying to move beyond these ominous feelings. As dark as it all may sound, it has shed a positive light on how I create. “
“In most of this work I have also reintroduced the application of typography as well as the usage of multiple panels in a painting; elements that I enjoyed early on, yet had faded with time.“
My images almost always seem to portray doom and gloom! I’ve been shoveling through my brain, tossing out some darkness and trying my hardest to stick to absorbing positive thoughts.
In the process I was thinking about my fifteen year old daughter poking fun of my typical dad concerns, complaints and worries. Sometimes my only response to her is “You Will See“. It’s sometimes tough to keep fighting off problems and remain strong inside.
Of course, we’ve all been through trouble. We deal with it and keep moving ahead. She’s had a different life than I have and I do my best to see her happy, but just a suggestion to keep in mind: It is not that easy to keep going. Hold on to hope through it all as you go forth.
This is an index of art that I have found profound, interesting,
beautiful or enlightening. In any event, I find that art soothes my
soul. I enjoy painting figurative and portraits in oils using the more
traditional Flemish technique, but it never really brought me the kind
of money I need to live off of. Such is the life of a painter today.
Please enjoy.
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Bob Dob is the patron artist of everyone who will probably have Social Distortion playing at their wedding, assorted birthdays and their funeral. His colorful portraits of diminutive punk rockers, meanie mouseketeers, and pill, pot, cheese, paper bag and amp headed everymen, are instantly captivating, especially for those of us who can’t get through Ball and Chain without getting a little choked up.
The Hermosa Beach native grew up in an area with plenty of punk rock graft and glory to be inspired by, and his craft, honed at the Otis College of Art and Design, is detailed and intricate without sacrificing warmth and feeling.
It feels like every portrait was done at sundown after a long day, or at sun up after a long night. Check out his website for more information and imagine how great one of his pieces would look above your JCM 800.
Bob Dob was born and raised in the once lazy beach town of Hermosa Beach California. After his child hood dream of becoming a pro baseball player was taken from him due to a battle with cancer he gravitated towards music and art. Playing in a punk band for 10 years named Lunacy, the exposure to the music scene in Los Angeles would have great influence on his art.
While focusing on music theory at a local community college Bob began taking drawing and painting classes. Eventually his interest in art took over and he transferred to Otis College of Art and Design in 1998 where he earned his Bachelors Fine Art Degree in illustration..
After graduation in 2001 he freelanced working for such clients as The Fox Family Channel, Aflac, Kraft, Intel, The Village Voice, American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, Random House Publishing, and numerous editorial magazines.
This is an index of art that I have found profound, interesting,
beautiful or enlightening. In any event, I find that art soothes my
soul. I enjoy painting figurative and portraits in oils using the more
traditional Flemish technique, but it never really brought me the kind
of money I need to live off of. Such is the life of a painter today.
Please enjoy.
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
When she was only 9 she moved to Italy, where she started to draw seriously: manga at first and realistic things afterward. She attended an art institute and graduated in 2004. During the school years, she starts to paint with oil colors, a technique that soon to become her favorite. Hence she attended the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice where she found a lot of inspiration for her realistic and academic art. A year later she moved to Tuscany where she graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence. She focused her interest in more things like digital art and illustration.
She also completed her studies at the academy of digital arts NEMO NT where she gained the title of student of the year.
Ania has always been interested in realistic, renaissance works. Her first loves are Salvador Dalí and Wojtek Siudmak’s big canvases, full of absurd and strange creations, painted in a divine way.
Buying an artwork
Please contact her agent if you would like to buy an original painting by Ania Tomicka or to be notified when there is some new art for sale.
This is an index of art that I have found profound, interesting,
beautiful or enlightening. In any event, I find that art soothes my
soul. I enjoy painting figurative and portraits in oils using the more
traditional Flemish technique, but it never really brought me the kind
of money I need to live off of. Such is the life of a painter today.
Please enjoy.
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Michael Tole is an American artist who was born in 1979. Michael Tole has had several gallery and museum exhibitions, including at the Conduit Gallery. There have been many articles about Michael Tole, including ‘Photo-realism at Cain Schulte’ written by Kenneth Baker for San Francisco Chronicle in 2009.
This is an index of art that I have found profound, interesting,
beautiful or enlightening. In any event, I find that art soothes my
soul. I enjoy painting figurative and portraits in oils using the more
traditional Flemish technique, but it never really brought me the kind
of money I need to live off of. Such is the life of a painter today.
Please enjoy.
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
This is an amazing artist, and I feel moved by his art whenever I look at it. His technical ability and eye for beauty is astounding. Were I to be able to perform such feats! Ai! He is celebrated all over the world as others, just like myself, have also come to appreciate his brilliance and skill.
Jesús Helguera (May 28, 1910 – December 5, 1971)
was a Mexican painter. Among his most famous works are La Leyenda de los
Volcanes, La Leyenda, Popocapetl & Ixtaccihuatl, Hidalgo,
“Rompiendo las Cadenas”, El Aguila y la Serpiente, and Juan Diego y la
Virgen de Guadalupe.
Jesús Enrique Emilio de la Helguera Espinoza was born to Spanish economist Alvaro Garcia Helguera and Maria Espinoza Escarzarga on May 28, 1910 in Chihuahua, Mexico.
He lived his childhood in Mexico City and later moved to Córdoba in the state of Veracruz.
His family fled from the Mexican Revolution to Ciudad Real, Castilla la Nueva, Spain and thereafter moved to Madrid. Jesús first gained interest in the arts during primary school and would often be found wandering the halls of the Del Prado Museum.
At the age of 14, he was admitted to the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes and later studied at the Academia de San Fernando. Helguera later married Julia Gonzalez Llanos, a native of Madrid, who modeled for many of his later paintings and with whom he raised two children.
Jesús first worked as an illustrator at the Editorial Araluce working on books, magazines and comics with many of his published works done in gouache.
He became a professor of visual arts at a Bilboa Art Institute at the age of 18 and worked for magazines such as Estampa. Helguera was forced to move back to the Mexican state of Veracruz due to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and following economic crisis.
Upon his arrival, mural making was en vogue and he was hired by Cigarrera la Moderna, a tobacco company, to produce calendar artwork printed by Imprenta Galas de Mexico.
Much of his work reflected his own fascination with Aztec Mythology, Catholicism, and the diverse Mexican landscape. His paintings showed an idealized Mexico and it was his romantic approach that gave his paintings the heroic impact that eventually made him famous.
In 1940, he created what is arguably the most famous amongst his paintings, La Leyenda de los Volcanes, which was inspired by the legend of Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl. It was later purchased by Ensenanza Objectiva, a producer of didactic images for schools.
Many of his paintings would later be reproduced in a variety of different calendars and cigar boxes reaching households and businesses throughout Mexico.
Helguera continued to paint privately and illustrate for various clients until his death on December 5, 1971. Jesus Helguera continues to be celebrated in Mexico, Spain and the United States.
His artwork are numerous and profound. The space limitations on this blog are many. I can only cram so much art into it. Here are some last minute additions…
Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
My Poetry
Art that Moves Me
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
There is a cool, quiet elegance to Alan
Macdonald’s paintings, which belies the disequilibrium at their heart.
His figures, grey eyed and dreaming, might be time travellers, drawing
distant cousinship from the portraits of Rembrandt or Frans Hals. His
bucolic northern landscapes lay claim to an equally venerable artistic
heritage. But if an accretion of the art historical past informs his
imagery, it is transposed into a world where confidence has been lost,
where the spiritual beliefs and myths which once bound man to nature,
and through nature, to the divine, fail to connect.
Frequently, single letters or words, even meticulously copied dictionary definitions, are added to the sections of a painting, as if language might hold a key.
We follow through the a,b,c, trying to piece together the jigsaw, but language proves as fallible as any system by which we structure our existence, and we are left with a series of miswired lexical circuits. Is a landscape “an area of land regarded as being visually distinct,” or is it “a painting, drawing, photograph etc. depicting natural scenery?”
Macdonald lets both definitions stand. Though he would not call himself a surrealist, like Magritte, he points up the ambiguities surrounding real objects and their images in art, encouraging us to consider his work as more than a simple pictorial narrative.
The otherworldly characters in his
series of portrait heads have the look of forgotten pilgrims, bonneted
and constrained by cords like the followers of some perverse form of
Puritanism. Each is neatly titled according to a state of mind:
hedonist, altruist, sadist. We read the titles and search their waxen
features, hoping to discover their soul in the curl of a lip, or the
tilt of a chin. Despite this attempt at self assertion the figures
remain isolated, pinned down by their cords, as if by the codes and
strictures of society.
These are beautiful paintings, all the
more potent for their distilled sense of calm. Macdonald gives us no
answers, but the questions he raises about the search for faith and
identity in a difficult modern world touch a nerve, and in the faces of
his pilgrims, we recognise ourselves.
It seems fitting that artist Alan Macdonald, born and brought up in Malawi, one of the least populated areas in South East Africa, now lives and works in a small town not too far from medieval Edinburgh, Scotland. His meticulously crafted images are emblematic of Scottish characteristics – love of nature, history, humour, beauty and surreal scenery – linked together in compelling enigmatic and sometimes foreign imagery.
" “It took me years to realize that it is the darkness in things that I respond to, whether it is a painting by Francisco Goya, a song by Leonard Cohen, a play by William Shakespeare or a film by Pedro Almodovar.
When I was a child living in Africa, I was outside on a night lit by the moon and, feeling a little scared, I stepped from the light into a dark shadow,” the artist told Tatha Gallery.
“The darkness wrapped itself around me and fear was replaced by an understanding that I was being protected. Later, when I was twelve, a boy walked into my classroom with drawings he had done in pencil. They were representations of figures, that went from the white of the paper to the blackest black that the graphite could muster, and from that moment the artistic light for me was ignited.”
-Alan MacDonald
There is seemingly no element too exotic to inhabit an oil painting by Alan MacDonald, whose works traverse cultures and histories to present something always elegant in execution. At the base of MacDonald’s work seems to be a need for adventure, exploring inspiration and varying perspectives in each work.
Often incorporating hyper-realistic contemporary popular culture objects and well-known phrases, Macdonald’s Renaissance style paintings are at once familiar yet strange, inviting close inspection as if asking us to solve an amusing, highly original puzzle. Alan Macdonald acknowledges that, indeed, the solution can sometimes elude him; his skill is to give us hauntingly beautiful pictorial clues which tug on our psyche while making us smile, even laugh out loud while encouraging us to search for our own answers.
Alan Macdonald considers his work a visual journey with a subtext of a sense of adventure and excitement but destination unknown. As he tells us… “There is the belief in every painting that one day, as you set sail, you will find a faraway beach on which to land, avoiding the ragged rocks and inky depths of doubt. On one of the luckier voyages you arrive somewhere that is strangely familiar but which you have never seen before. It is a distant coast of you”.
It took me years to realise that it is the darkness in things that I respond to, whether it is a painting by Francisco Goya, a song by Leonard Cohen, a play by William Shakespeare or a film by Pedro Almodovar. When I was a child living in Africa, I was outside on a night lit by the moon and, feeling a little scared, I stepped from the light into a dark shadow. The darkness wrapped itself around me and fear was replaced by an understanding that I was being protected. Later, when I was twelve, a boy walked into my classroom with drawings he had done in pencil. They were representations of figures, that went from the white of the paper to the blackest black that the graphite could muster, and from that moment the artistic light for me was ignited.
A wise old German painter friend once said to me, after seeing me floundering around trying to explain away one of my paintings, “Remember, Alan, your paintings are like a bubble, and a bubble with a hole in it is no longer a bubble.” So with that in mind, I will tread carefully.
-ALAN MACDONALD
Nothing pleases me more than when someone laughs out loud whilst looking at one of my paintings. As comedians are aware, humour is a subversive thing, breaking down barriers and making others more receptive to your message or point of view. Years ago, a particularly tired, world-weary man came into my exhibition, with an, 'impress me if you can' expression on his face. He trudged from painting to painting, unimpressed… that is, until he came to a painting of a man covered in tattoos with a row of pins in his forehead, called 'Masochist'. It caused him to burst out laughing! He then went back and looked again at all the paintings he had just trudged past, now taking his time and responding to them all. It confirmed for me the importance of humour in art.
All the shapes and forms my work takes, have evolved over years. Painting clothes that resemble period clothing, for example, happened naturally. At first because it just seemed right, but I now realise that it brings to the work a sense of someone lost and out of time, desperately trying to work out the universal question, “What the hell am I doing here?” Especially when modern items like a can of coke or a scooter are included. Max Ernst once wrote that an artist should have one foot in the subconscious and one in the conscious. This, I think, is what I am trying to do.
-ALAN MACDONALD
When I begin a painting, I feel like I am embarking on a journey, one in which I have no idea of the ultimate destination. As a result there is a real sense of adventure and excitement as you set sail into the unknown, armed only with a belief that, one day, you will find a faraway beach on which to land. Unfortunately, too often, the ship founders on the jagged rocks of doubt, leaving your heart to sink into the inky depths, from where you have to resurrect it. On the luckier voyages, though, you arrive somewhere that is strangely familiar, but which you have never seen before. It’s a distant coast of you.
-ALAN MACDONALD
Alan MacDonald is a brilliant artist, and I would be proud to hang his art within my home.
Movies that Inspired Me
Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
My Poetry
Art that Moves Me
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Mark Ryden is an American artist based in California. He is said to have ushered in the new genre of painting and Pop Surrealism, into mainstream art culture. His style, which is reminiscent of the works of the Old Masters, has blurred the traditional boundaries between high and low art. Though inspired by surrealist techniques, he has filled his work with cultural connotations. His work is both mystical and realistic, innocent and eerie. The bright colors and childlike figures on the surface hide a darker, mysterious psyche. His paintings are meticulous and full of detail, with each detail having a significant importance.
Mark Ryden. The painter Mark Ryden is one of the prominent representatives of the Lowbrow art movement, which is also called Surrealist Pop.
- Mark Ryden - 42 artworks - WikiArt.org
Tell me a bit about yourself? How did you life in art begin?M.R.: I spent the vast majority of my time as a youth drawing and painting. I was also very interested in math and science, but art was my main love. In college, I pursued illustration because I didn’t see myself fitting it with what was happening in the fine art world of the 1980s. I had a passion for classical art, figuration, surrealism, and imagination. These subjects were all but banned from what I saw as a dry and dull art world at that time. For a decade I did commercial work, but things started to change dramatically in the 1990s. I found myself part of the fresh exciting art movement of Pop Surrealism.
Dressed in black with round, wire-rimmed glasses, a black fedora and a silvery goatee, the Pop Surrealist looks like a magical wizard as he surveys the fantastical haven of desserts he’s created for American Ballet Theatre’s new production of “Whipped Cream.”
It was quite the spectacle. It was his paintings brought to life.
Ginormous sugary confections glint under draping stage lights: velvety swirls of sugar plum pastry, strawberry-topped cupcakes, powder-coated chocolate drops and glossy, melon-sized gum balls. Theatrical technicians, like Willy Wonka factory workers, scramble around the artist.
Stage hands roll towering peaks of whipped cream across the floor on dollies while prop artists affix Swarovski crystals to vanilla-iced tarts.
“C’mere,”
Ryden beckons, slipping behind a cotton candy-pink dessert counter, a
proverbial kid in his self-conjured candy store. The black backside of
the giant set piece exposes the infrastructure behind the magic —
ladders and trap doors that the dancers scurry up and through.
“It’s
all these details,” Ryden says, showing off the underside of a
monstrous tin coffee can that one of the characters pops out of. “We had
to make these openings big enough for the dancers’ tutus to get
through.”
How did you develop your style or aesthetic?M.R.: I believe if an artist consciously attempts to develop a “style” that art will be hollow and superficial. An artist’s work has to develop more honestly and naturally. I think my work is simply the result of the subconscious accumulation of everything I am interested in. I try not to judge any particular inspiration as being more valid than another. I can let an Old Masters painting influence me just as much as a vintage cartoon.
Ryden, nicknamed the “godfather of Pop Surrealism” by Interview
magazine, is known for his kitschy, brightly colored paintings blending
pop culture elements and old master techniques for a glossy,
danger-tinged, fairy-tale-like aesthetic. His first European
retrospective, at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga in Spain,
closed on March 5.
Can you describe your working process from idea to finished product?M.R.: I start by looking at the things I surround myself that inspire me. I can’t move forward in any way if I don’t feel a strong spark of excitement or creativity. It’s important to be in a peaceful state of mind and then I invite the spirits to come into the studio. I don’t stare into a blank canvas or paper. I look through my various collections of books, toys, statues, photographs and other things, and something will trigger an idea. I will make many, very loose sketches. Eventually I will be forced to pick something to take further. The decision is difficult because I can’t make that many finished paintings. They are meticulously painted and take a very long time to create.
Ryden, who launched his career designing book and album covers, including Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous,” did more than simply design the costumes and backdrops though. His cutesy, seemingly saccharine style with a darkly humorous, Tim Burton-like twist inspired the creation of the production.
There’s something very unsettling, disturbing, about his paintings, which hides behind the sometimes very sweet surface.”
-Alexei Ratmansky
“His style is completely original, it’s very precise and detailed. He
uses classical techniques, but the story he tells is very contemporary,”
Ratmansky says. “There’s something very unsettling, disturbing, about
his paintings, which hides behind the sometimes very sweet surface. I
just thought it was a good fit for the music and that it would make this
1920s work feel contemporary.”
What are the various challenges you face?M.R.: My biggest challenge is managing my time. There are some many paintings and various projects that I want to do, but I can only do so many things. I often try to do too much. The business and logistical side of being an artist can swallow up all my time if I am not diligent to prevent it. I spend too much time with email. I hate email.
Ryden typically works solo, painting on flat canvases in his Portland,
Ore., studio. He and his wife, the artist Marion Peck, moved there last
year after Ryden had spent 35 years in L.A.
What kind of narratives or stories do you like to convey through your work?M.R.: I don’t attempt to convey any of my own stories or narratives, instead I like that my work can trigger the viewer to imagine their own narrative or story. For me, the meaning of a painting can’t be described with words or a story. Instead it is the image itself that is the meaning. I choose to work with figures that carry iconic power, but I like to leave the mystery undisturbed. I leave it to the viewer to interpret the images how they will.
Mark Ryden is a veteran of the Pop-Surrealism style, having been at
the forefront of this genre since the late 1990’s when it was first
taking roots in the artistic community. A curiosity cabinet personified,
Mark Ryden’s works are often presented in thematic groups where one
major theme is explored throughout the series, further interacting with
Ryden’s main influences, including: Post world-war toys to historical
figures such as Abraham Lincoln, meat, dogma, religion and symbolism,
and into numerology, mysticism and occultism.
Ryden’s primary
medium is oil on canvas or panel, with each piece beautifully and
precisely encased in its own unique frame, many of which are original
designs by Mark Ryden himself, with the remainder coming from restored
antique frames. The frames are an artwork of and to themselves, and when
married with the artwork, transports the viewer through the
looking-glass and into a most surreal vision of the 19th century.
What would you cite as your inspirations behind your work?M.R.: Inspiration is the most valuable commodity for an artist; it is for me anyway. My studio is packed full of things that inspire me. I live inside my own cabinet of curiosities. My studio and house are overflowing with stuff. I regularly go to flea markets and antique shops where I have amassed a variety of things that inspire me. I collect everything from old children’s books, interesting product packages, to toys, photographs, medical models, skeletons, shells, minerals, and religious statues. I also have an extensive collection of books on shelves that go all the way up to the high ceiling behind my easel and drawing table. I think it is the range of diversity of my inspirations that most defines my art.
Artworks
from Ryden’s 1998 “The Meat Show” series contemplate meat and the idea
that we, stripped of our humanity, are ourselves meaty creations. Ryden
also explores the relationship we have to meat as food, in comparison to
the living creatures the meat was originally taken from, and also how
the viewing of meat has changed over the centuries to a point where to
see it depicted in contemporary artwork is almost absurd and strange.
Such is our modern-day relationship with meat in much of western
society.
“I believe to get ideas you have to nourish the
spirit. I stuff myself full of the things I like: pictures of bugs,
paintings by Bouguereau and David, books about Pheneous T. Barnum, films
by Ray Harryhausen, old photographs of strange people, children’s books
about space and science, medical illustrations, music by Frank Sinatra
and Debussy, magazines, T.V., Jung and Freud, Ren and Stimpy, Joseph
Campbell and Nostradamus, Ken and Barbie, Alchemy, Freemasonary,
Buddhism. At night my head is so full of ideas I can’t sleep. I mix it
all together and create my own doctrine of life and the universe. To me,
certain things seem to fit together. There are certain parallels and
clues all over the place. There may be a little part of Alice in
Wonderland that fits in. Charles Darwin, and Colonel Sanders provide
pieces. To me the world is full of awe and wonder. This is what I put in
my paintings.”
Which artists do you admire? How have they influenced you?M.R.: I admire and have been influenced by countless artists. Most are from long ago such as Carpaccio and Bronzino from the early Italian Renaissance. I like Northern Dutch artists like Van Eyck and the later French academic painters David, Gérôme and Ingres. But, I also like contemporary artists like John Currin. One of my favorite painters right now is Neo Rauch. They all influence me in many different ways. I like the way Bouguereau exquisitely paints flesh while the characters of Leonoroa Carrington seem mystical.
Ryden is also a proficient writer and
includes artist statements and review essays for each of his artistic
series, which can be found at his website here.
Reading through the writings, one is immediately drawn to the open
frankness Ryden has when discussing his method, as described in his
statement for “Wondertoonel” 2004, (which roughly translates
as “wondrous theatre”) which gives the viewer an insight into the mind
of the artist whilst also providing a guide to navigate his
breathtakingly surreal artworks by:
“It is only in childhood
that contemporary society truly allows for imagination. Children can see
a world ensouled, where bunnies weep and bees have secrets, where
“inanimate” objects are alive. Many people think that childhood’s world
of imagination is silly, unworthy of serious consideration, something to
be outgrown. Modern thinking demands that an imaginative connection to
nature needs to be overcome by “mature” ways of thinking about the
world. Human beings used to connect to life through mystery and
mythology. Now this kind of thinking is regarded as primitive or naive.
Without it, we cut ourselves off from the life force, the world soul,
and we are empty and starving.”
What would you say is your favorite piece of your own work and what does it mean to you?M.R.: I like different pieces for different reasons. One piece that pops into mind is Medium Yams because of its modest scale and simplicity. In general I gravitate towards creating massive, detailed, and epic works. While Medium Yams was a very small and simple piece it held great power. It was a favorite of many at the exhibition where it was displayed.
Mark Ryden came to preeminence in the 1990’s during a time when many
artists, critics and collectors were quietly championing a return to the
art of painting. With his masterful technique and disquieting content,
Ryden quickly became one of the leaders of this movement on the West
Coast.
Upon first glance Ryden’s work seems to mirror the Surrealists’
fascination with the subconscious and collective memories. However,
Ryden transcends the initial Surrealists’ strategies by consciously
choosing subject matter loaded with cultural connotation. His dewy
vixens, cuddly plush pets, alchemical symbols, religious emblems,
primordial landscapes and slabs of meat challenge his audience not
necessarily with their own oddity but with the introduction of their
soothing cultural familiarity into unsettling circumstances.
Viewers are initially drawn in by the comforting beauty of Ryden’s
pop-culture references, then challenged by their circumstances, and
finally transported to the artist’s final intent – a world where
creatures speak from a place of childlike honesty about the state of
mankind and our relationships with ourselves, each other and our past.
There is an obvious horror connected with the meat industry. The blood, the gore, the inhumane butchery. So many of us indirectly participate in this with our ravenous consumption of meat. Sue Coe has explored that arena exquisitely in her work and writings. In my own art I am not personally making a statement or judgement about the meat consumption in our culture. I feel more like I am just observing it. Just like T-rex, I myself am a passionate meat-eater. I feel that the consumption of animal flesh is a natural primal instinct just like sex and making paintings. But there is that paradox of knowing how that scrumptious porterhouse made it to my dinner plate. We have lost any kind of reverence for this. It would be interesting if people would have to kill an animal themselves before they earned the right to eat it.
Beyond the conceptual impact, meat simply has a very strong visual quality. The wonderful variety of textures and patterns in the marbling of the meat is sumptuous. Subtle pinks gently swirl around with rich vermillions and fatty yellow ochres. These visual qualities alone are seductive enough to make meat the subject of a work of art. Meat is glorious to paint. It is so easy to transcend the representational to the abstract. Meat has been a subject for painters from Rembrandt to Van Gogh.
- In a quote from Juxtapoz magazine back in the day, Ryden explains his reason for incorporation meat into his work.
Clearly infused with classical references, Ryden’s work is not only
inspired by recent history, but also the works of past masters. He
counts among his influences Bosch, Bruegel and Ingres with generous nods
to Bouguereau and Italian and Spanish religious painting.
Over the past decade, this marriage of accessibility, craftsmanship
and technique with social relevance, emotional resonance and cultural
reference has catapulted Ryden beyond his roots and to the attention of
museums, critics and serious collectors. Ryden’s work has been exhibited
in museums and galleries worldwide, including a recent museum
retrospective “Wondertoonel” at the Frye Museum of Art in Seattle and
Pasadena Museum of California Art.
Mark Ryden was born in Medford Oregon. He received a BFA in 1987 from
Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He currently lives and works
in Los Angeles where he paints slowly and happily amidst his countless
collections of trinkets, statues, skeletons, books, paintings and
antique toys.
To see more of Mark Ryden’s stunning artwork, please visit his website, or his Facebook page.
Movies that Inspired Me
Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
My Poetry
Art that Moves Me
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
This is an introduction to the art of Greg (Craola) Simkins. He has created his own form of art with appears to be an off-shoot of the “low brow” movement that originated out of California. He is a talented young man that paints a very odd and eclectic mixture of birds and contemporaneous themes all mashed together in a kind of confusing array of post surrealistic nightmares.
His niche is low-brow bird portraiture.
Greg ‘Craola’ Simkins was born in 1975 in Torrance California, just south of Los Angeles. He grew up with a menagerie of animals including a number of rabbits, which often emerge in his paintings. He began drawing at the early age of three and was inspired by various cartoons and books.
Why the name The Escape Artist?
The idea of escape is getting lost in a daydream and wandering through one’s imagination. As I make art, this process is very important to me. It’s important in the planning stages as I just fill my sketchbooks with whatever interesting images that entertain me, and it is important at the composition stage where I lay out these ideas in their ideal situations so as to move onto the final stage of painting them.
Once I get to the painting stage, the concept is at most finalized, but with a bit of room for improvisation. Once I start painting, the muscle memory and mechanics take over and I will put on music, audiobooks, movies, podcasts, etc… but generally, find myself zoning out and falling into the process of painting which can be almost meditative. Next thing you know and 8 hours have passed by and something new has been created on the canvas. It’s an awesome feeling being in that “Escape Zone.”
Simkins’ art continued to progress to the age of 18, when he started
doing graffiti under the name ‘CRAOLA’. Graffiti art became his impetus
for creating and gave him the confidence to paint large works. In
addition it taught him perspective, color theory and further developed
artistic skills, which later translated into his work with acrylics.
What’s an average day in the studio?
Once I get in, I answer emails, go through sketches and draw a little to warm up, maybe edit some video, finish my coffee, and then sit down at the easel and pour my paint for the day. Once that is in place, I will paint as long a stretch as possible. I don’t like taking breaks and will generally eat my lunch while working as well.
I try to keep in that creative headspace and block out the rest of the world. Around dinner time, I go inside and help out making food and getting the kids to the table, we spend time together as a family, put the kids to bed at bedtime, and then sit down to watch a show with my wife and work on drawings and concepts.
After receiving his Bachelor’s Degree in Studio Art from California
State University of Long Beach in 1999, Simkins worked as an illustrator
for various clothing companies and bands. He later moved on to
Treyarch/Activision where he worked on video games including Tony Hawk
2X, Spiderman 2 and Ultimate Spiderman while attempting to paint with
every free moment he had.
In 2005, Simkins pursued his desire to paint as a full-time artist.
Since then, he has been featured in numerous group exhibitions and had
successfully sold out solo exhibitions.
Birds are key figures in your work. Where does your fascination with birds come from?
How could anyone not be fascinated with birds? They are these jewels, weapons, music boxes, and much more that dart around the sky as masters of the air. They defy gravity, they curiously watch us—waiting for us to make a move, they come in so many varieties, some create bonds with us, others taunt us, and some would even comfort us.
They are incredible creatures, and I have chosen to give them personalities in my work and in The Outside for all these reasons. The main bird in my work is Breeze, a large blue jay that befriends my character Ralf “The White Knight” and protects and teaches him the way of that world.
It is his careful weaving of pop culture, the old masters, nature,
carnival kitsch, and (most importantly) his warped imagination, that
makes Greg Simkins a sought-after surrealist painter today. Simkins’
artwork has appeared in galleries throughout the world.
The exhibition includes a number of beautiful works on paper. What’s your relationship with drawing and how is it part of your creative process?
It can be either to get an idea out as fast as possible so as not to lose it or something to later be refined into its own finished project. I enjoy getting the gesture of an idea to use later on in a piece, but sometimes I feel that gesture is beautiful in itself, even with all its flaws. It is the kernel of an idea and I chose to share some of those in this exhibition.
I also enjoy doing charcoal portraits which gives me a whole other way to study shape and form and mark making, which speaks to my other work. Working in multiple mediums always teaches me something new to add to each other.
“My creative demands are self imposed and my frustrations are my
limitations. I sketch a lot and plan many pieces that I never get to paint. It kills me, there are so many things I want to paint and find the ticking of the clock to be deafening. Most of the time it is too many ideas and a lot get shelved or pop up in future shows. It is also a blessing sometimes because I get to revisit these ideas and tinker with them a bit and watch them blossom into something far greater than my original vision. It is as if the technique catches up with the idea over that time span, and I am thankful for it.”
– Greg ‘Craola’ Simkins (Empty Lighthouse Magazine)
Fictional Story Related Index
This is an index of full text reprints of stories that I have
read that influenced me when I was young. They are rather difficult to
come by today, as where I live they are nearly impossible to find. Yes,
you can find them on the internet, behind paywalls. Ah, that’s why all
those software engineers in California make all that money. Well, here
they are FOR FREE. Enjoy reading them.
Movies that Inspired Me
Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
My Poetry
Art that Moves Me
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
“The Prince of Pop Art”, Mitch O’Connell is a beloved, cherished and respected leader of the “Lowbrow” art movement and one of the greatest illustrators of all time! Inspired by Pin-ups, hot-rods, comics, sideshows and all things kitsch, cuddly and curvaceous, he takes the vintage and makes it contemporary with his distinctive, eye-popping Pop Art imagery.
“I'm tempted to tear out the pages and hang them on the wall!"
-USA Today
He’s happy to play nice and follow instructions with illustration assignments for nearly every publication on Earth.
"We're smitten with everything Mitch has ever done. There's no escaping that his art is awesome!"
-Bizarre magazine
Magazine work includes Newsweek, Time, Rolling Stone, New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, GQ and Playboy! Overnight deadlines met for newspapers include The New York Times, Village Voice, Chicago Tribune and dozens more!
He’s been featured in the world of rock ’n’ roll on album covers and posters for groups from The Ramones to Weezer to No Doubt to Moby! Mitch’s doodles are utilized in advertising campaigns for major companies from McDonalds to KFC, 7-11 to Coca-Cola! And when he’s not working with an art director, his fine art paintings have been exhibited in sold-out gallery shows from New York to Berlin, Tokyo to Miami and Hollywood to Mexico City.
"An eye-popping curation of the pop artist's finest illustrations!"
-Yahoo! Music
His sexy tattoo flash is a fixture on the walls of tattoo shops around the word (and on the bodies of thousands of tattoo lovers) with many of the designs collected in two bestselling books “ Mitch O’Connell Tattoos Volume 1” and “Mitch O’Connell Tattoos Volume 2“!
His newest book, “Mitch O’Connell, the World’s Best Artist by Mitch O’Connell” is a huge career-spanning retrospective look at his art from the age of 3 to now!
"A pop surrealist and low-brow luminary ...an over-the-top, kitschy, vibrant mood-elevating coffee table book!"
-Huffington Post
The following are some reviews for those of you who are a tad unsure of this artists greatness…
Earlier today, if you heard a sort of weird, high-pitched shrieking noise, not unlike the mating cry of some long extinct bird, wafting high above the trees, far off in distance...it was just ME receiving a package from my UPS Heart Throb that contained THIS BOOK, quite possibly THE BEST BOOK EVER!
First of all - it has a vinyl cover. A VINYL COVER!!! Perfect for tubby-time viewing, or perhaps for enjoying in the inflatable wading pool on those hot summer days.
And then there's the AWESOME, AMAZING ARTWORK on the inside. From tattooed vixens to big-eyed bunny rabbits, there's something here for the whole family...if you have a family where the kiddies are allowed to look at pictures of nekkid women. There is a mind-altering feast for the eyes in store for you.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to get back to squeezing that vinyl cover. (This is apparently a new fetish I didn't know I had, and to tell you the truth, it's got me a little worried.)
- I'm Still Squealing!
A review of his book on Amazon.com
If you liked the art on the cover, well, there is more of it inside. The book itself is reminiscent of retro children's books with a foam / vinyl embossed type cover. It even has glitter. Its something you can't appreciate on the internet. The size is thick with tons of vibrant reproductions of his artwork.
There is lots of detail like the pages have a contoured edge. The book construction itself is amazing. The reason I bought this on amazon was because my bookstore's copy was damaged. Seeing it in real life made me want this book, so I had to get it.
Its just fun to pick up and flip through.
Chances are you are an artist and will find some inspiration in here even if it is a little bit crazy/freaky. I wouldn't give this book to a child, the audience is more adult. I can't say this is lacking anything as it is just an art book with good examples. The time that went into this book puts it over the top.
Worth 5 stars. I can see why 66 people thought it was awesome. I don't know who would rate this a 4 or less unless they had a problem with amazon. Sweet!
Indirectly, I've been a fan of Mitch's art since roughly, 1987. I worked as a designer at a newspaper and we had subscriptions to two clip art services (big, hulking glossy printed pages of several images, covering nearly anything that can be advertised).
One was Metro and the other was Dynamic Graphics. Dynamic Graphics was my "go-to" service as, each month, I scoured it's pages for that flashy, interesting, fun art with the peculiar "MoC" signature.
Since then, I learned the MoC was a cool artist named Mitch O'Connell and I saw his work here and there in Heavy Metal and some comics. I've moved on from the newspaper business but, thanks in part to the Internet and various art books, I've been able to follow Mitch's enthusiastic, dynamic work the last several years.
I've always admired his bold, daring renderings. As an illustrator myself, I find inspiration in his lines and color palette. Today, I'm proud to say I now own this comprehensive book. Tons of color, tons of illustrations, tons of inspiration.
Even the design of the book itself is daring and bold. I've perused it several times since receiving it in the mail and I plan on perusing it several more times, seeing something new and interesting each time I open the book.
Mr. O'Connell's art speaks for itself but I'll say that It's unique a completely different style than what anyone may be used to. I especially like the 70s-style. He not only acknowledges it, he embraces it and you have to admire that. I highly recommend!
- Lived up to my expectations
The puffy plastic cover over Mitch O'Connell The World's Greatest Artist gives a damn good indication of what's inside: A massive, whopping, ridiculously definitive collection of Mitch... and all Mitch.
From the cutesy-sweet to the clip art to the truly naughty, here is EVERYthing. Superb book design makes the collection seem to fly, float and take on a life of its own.
There was a long, long wait for this terrific tome; it was truly worth the wait. WOW!
- Holy moley! All this and World War, too.
This book is so amazing you'll want to sleep with it tucked under your head. And thanks to the soft puffy cover you can!
Try it, i did. Hoping some of O'Connell's brilliance would seep into my brain.
Fat chance! If you have been a long time devote of O'Connell or have no idea who he is (been living under a rock?) You NEED this book!
By merely placing this book on your coffee table you will immediately notice that you have become more attractive to the world.
You'll start getting more dates than you can fit in your calendar. And you don't want to be left behind when it hits the New York Times best seller list, do you? I didn't think so. Get in on Mitch-Mania now!
- My Bible has arrived!
I cant put this book down!! It had me hooked just with the glitter cover. Wow!! I've loved this mans work for years. I can sit and look at his art and tattoo flash for hours. This is a great addition to my collection of his books and art work. Filled with beautiful women and kitsch galore. This book is VERY large and informative. We learn more about the man, myth and legend!!! It's also a great price for so much magnificent eye candy. I highly recommend it to any lover of Pop, Surrealism, Kitsch or just Damn good art! :)
- 5.0 out of 5 stars This book is Fan-Stinken-Tastic!!
It has a sparkly cover and It's Mitch! So, It's good. I usually only read on the Crapper but I already crapped today. I may just break my own rule and read this while sitting on the couch!
- The most important book you will ever buy
EXCITEMENT! FUN! NUDITY! THRILLS!
BALLOONS! NUDITY! ALCOHOL! CAKE!
HILARITY! NUDITY!
When a book has that as it's opening intro you know you have stumbled across the new bible. Mitch may be the world's best artist (his words, mentioned many many times in this book) he is also probably the world's funniest artist.
This book is comical to the extreme, louds of laughing out loud guffaws and so much drink sprayed across the room, luckily I chose to read this in lots of different locations so everywhere got a nice even coating of beer.
This book is a huge collection of his artwork, from drawings as a kid to early adverts he was commissioned to draw to posters, tattoos and toilet seats, it is all here. The history of his rise to greatness and even a tour of his mansion (puts the Taj Mahal to shame) can be found in this book. Also its the only book I've come across that has a gift shop at the end.
Hopefully there will be more books from Mitch to entertain us all. I'm now off to locate him to get myself one of his tattoos.
- World's best book
The second worst thing about moving to Wisconsin (first being living under incipient fascism)is not having access to Mitch O'Connell. A lot of the art in this book only appeared in posters , leaflets and other material distributed in and around Chicago (Mitch 's art has appeared on everything from pencils and skateboards to delightful women's bare butts- I personally am waiting for the whoopee cushion).
Years ago I could pick the stuff up tear it off walls and enjoy it! My 20 year deprivation has been cured with this book collecting Mitch's unique (well sometimes a bit bizarre) interpretations of reality.
The world goes into Mitch's brain gets mashed around and comes out well wonderfully different- and you can see it all here in this book without skulking around sleazy burlesque houses, grunge band concerts and other affairs- though all of the latter do enhance the experience! Only thing that would make it better would be if it came with an inflatable Little Puddles doll.
- Modest Title Masks True Genius!
This is the only art book I own that actually entertained me. Face it - most art books you pay for nothing- a lot of white space around a a reproduction of a piece you can't afford. That means you are paying most of the cover price on blank or what design shysters call negative space. O'Connell doesn't waste anything- including your time.
Rather than hiring some fancy college boy shill to write essays, O'Connell does the writing his'sef which is why I am am actually going to read every word- eventually. Right now I'm just happy to skim and look at all the purty five star pictures.
By the way, not only are there sparkles in the puffy plasticine cover- its spot glitter- which means it was probably really expensive other than just expensive.
- Gave Me A Stiffy
Having known the artist for about 35 years, I've had the great pleasure of watching him progress from talented teen to peerless paragon of pop art. Now, with the publication of this classy compendium, anyone who is even remotely interested in popular art can share in this pleasure. With exceedingly-deft hand, keen eye, and acerbic wit, Mitch O’Connell has come to occupy a place in pop surrealism that is shared with only a few artists --Robert Williams, self-described progenitor of the ‘Lowbrow’ movement, springs to mind.
While many of the pop surrealists or other Lowbrow artists share the same interest in skewering the social, cultural, political, and sexual mores of our consumerist culture, no one --for my money, anyway-- does a better, funnier job of sending up the obsessions of the modern world. While his technical skill is beyond reproach, and repeated study of his work will prove this, it’s Mitch’s sense of humor that will find readers coming back to this volume for amusement long after the average coffee table book has been shelved and forgotten.
In a wonderful addition to the content, the exceedingly-high production values of the book --with a brilliant, sparkled and textured cover; heavy, glossy-stock pages; and stunning page layouts-- will make even those who are not familiar with Mitch’s work sit up and take notice. Presuming there are yearly awards given for outstanding book design, I’ll be not at all surprised to find this book topping the list of nominees.
So, summing up: If you’re a fan of Mitch O’Connell, buy the book. If you’re interested in modern art, buy the book. If you’re fond of well-designed and executed art books, buy the book. If you merely want to take a chance on a bold and brilliant artist, this is the one to pick up...you won’t be disappointed!!
- A peerless artist, a peerless book
I purchased this book expecting just another glowing biography of yet another pampered, spoiled, filthy rich, low-brow artist. All I can say is "I was blind...and now I see!" After reading this man's, no, this immortals, life story and gazing at his life's work, I declare myself his humble servant.
The colors, line work and, most importantly, the brilliance BEHIND the work, have given my life a purpose. I worship at the filthy, somewhat ripe feet of my Lord and Savior: Mitch O'Connell. Mitch, I hope you are reading this. I have scanned the photos from your book and created wallpaper (no, not digital wallpaper, but actual paper wallpaper) and covered the walls of my cabin with thousands of images from your book, and more importantly, you. I now live in my car and only enter my shrine to you, formally my home, to worship at an alter that I created that features an 8' paper mache head of you (it came out really cool- except the left side looks a little droopy and concave. One of my cats climbed onto it before it was fully dried.).
If you have any personal items that you could send me for my alter I would appreciate it. I would collect your hair, but....! Could you send me some of your old clothes or maybe some toe nail clippings? I would expect them to be brightly colored and dipped in glitter, just like your art. I am working on a life size action figure of you that I can clothe in Holy vestments so you can perform ceremonies and we can have imaginary conversations- together! Everyone out there, please, throw away your Bibles and holy books and pick up Mitch O'Connell The World's Best Artist and let's commence to worshipping at the Holy Church of Mitch! Amen!
- This Book Spoke To Me- no kidding it actually talked
The perfect book to introduce the unsuspecting Cool Kid to the work of Mitch O'Connell!
If you like hot rods, 1950's comics, kitsch culture, tattoos, big-breasted women who aren't afraid to spank you when necessary, pink poodle dogs, aliens, motorcycles and the sarcastic, self-aware humor of one of America's favorite retro-culture artist, then this is the book for you!
And it comes wrapped up in a plushy, plastic foam cover that cleans up easy if splattered with blood, baby vomit or spunk. Or a disgusting combination of all three!
This book will make you laugh!
This book will tentpole your trousers!
This book will make you a cooler individual than your lesser friends! I am cooler than you, because I own this book (and a few other Mitch O'Connell books too.)
What are you waiting for? Get up on this book!
- Throw money at your local bookseller for this book!
Mitch O'Connell's latest book, "Mitch O'Connell the World's Best Artist by Mitch O'Connell", is the BEST and GREATEST book ever penned by the Master to this date!
Mitch, my friend for over 30 years has created the world's MOST magical collection of SUPER ART.... yes, the term is SUPER ART!
Owning his most current book has cured my arthritis. By reading the pages my 60 year old eyes now possess 20/20 vision. I can walk without a cane. My elderly wife read it and is now using tampons again. THE BOOK IS A MIRACLE!!! This modest genius has created the cures for all maladies of the Human Condition by merely printing the World's Best Art; HIS World's Best Art and AMAZING LIFE STORY in this Remarkable 288 page book!
Ladies & Gentlemen throw away your Bibles because THIS IS IT!!!!!!! The only Good Book you will ever need!
You will never EVER get a bigger bang for your $20.
- GOD'S GIFT TO THE ART WORLD !!
All art books have pictures (that's kind of the idea) but how many would you sit down and read? Sure, "Mitch O'Connell, the World's Best Artist" is chock-full of the requisite lifetime's worth of artwork (well, maybe two-thirds to half a lifetime, he's not dead yet), but it's also brimming with personal tales and anecdotes filled with witty, self-deprecating braggadocio, all wrapped in a puffy, sparkly vinyl cover.
Not many other (any other?) artists can claim to have been published in everything from the New York Times to Juggs and you'll learn that and many other fascinating facts when you read this book.
Did I mention the puffy, sparkly vinyl cover? It's an art book which moonlights as a coaster, which is super-practical (buy a set!). So, if you like 60's kitsch, creepy clowns, and big-eyed rabbits (and who doesn't?) then this is the book for you.
- The first coffee table book you'll actually read!
I first saw Mitch's work back in the dark ages - before computers and t'internet and the writing of book online reviews. It was a "graphic novel" (trans.: Fat Expensive Comic Book) called GINGER FOX, and I've been following his work ever since, picking up the odd book or flyer or cover whenever I came across them.
Now, all of that scattered detritus has been collated into one big fat squishy plastic-covered wipe-clean book. Fatter and more expensive than Ginger Fox, who must be in her fatter and more expensive mid-50s' by now.
Mitch has an assured clean graphic line, a searing sense of eye-popping colour, a healthy interest in the female form, and a joyous sense of the pop-art poetry inherent in the commercial ephemera those fancy-pants "high art" snobs just don't get. I want to delve into the dark recesses of this man's "gentleman's magazine" collection, but fear I may never emerge... Go buy!! NOW!!
- Squishy!
I never in a million years would have thought I'd own this book. I'm a fan and I love art books but my own art has consumed all resources and left my book aquiring funds non existent. Fast forward to my B-day party this yr and I get Mitch's book for a gift. So of course we immediatly crack it open to take in the mind bending eye candy.. First words out of my mouth. "danmmit, he IS the Worlds Greatest Artist!"
Endless hours of entertainment. Known about in France. As advertised. All in all pretty stinkin' cool. Color me jealous and inspired all at the same time. So if you're like me, put it on your wish list, and if you can buy it just do it now. You'll be happy you treated yourself.
- Worlds Greatest Artist, yea right.
In 2015 my friend, the fabulous artist Mitch O'Connell, created this excellent illustration of Donald Trump as one of the evil aliens from John Carpenter's 1988 science fiction film, They Live. Once Trump became president, Mitch tried to install a billboard with the illustration, but no one in the US would let him. He ended up displaying it in Mexico City, though.
Well, Mitch recently found out that a Times Square billboard company will allow him to display his illustration on a billboard and he's started a gofundme campaign to make this dream a reality.
Fictional Story Related Index
This is an index of full text reprints of stories that I have
read that influenced me when I was young. They are rather difficult to
come by today, as where I live they are nearly impossible to find. Yes,
you can find them on the internet, behind paywalls. Ah, that’s why all
those software engineers in California make all that money. Well, here
they are FOR FREE. Enjoy reading them.
Movies that Inspired Me
Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
My Poetry
Art that Moves Me
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Today’s artist is the one the only, the amazing painter that turns pop-culture into surreal art, Todd Schorr! Everything he gets his brushes on are simply amazing. All his paintings have so much detail that every time I look back at the paintings I always notice something new to trigger my amazement.
Artist Todd Schorr has earned broad recognition as a master painter. The style and influences of his complex narrative painting have been attributed from a multitude of sources from Northern Renaissance to 18th and 19th century Romantic painters.
Todd Schorr is an American artist and one of the most prominent members of the "Lowbrow" art movement or pop surrealism. Combining a cartoon influenced visual vocabulary with a highly polished technical ability, based on the exacting painting methods of the Old Masters, Schorr weaves intricate narratives that are often biting yet humorous.
-Wikipedia
Todd Schorr is a living American artist and one of the heavy weights of the “Lowbrow” (pop surrealism) art movement. Keep that phrase “pop surrealism” in mind when you’re looking at his art. Similar to Alex Grey, Todd Schorr‘s pieces are vivid, colorful, and packed with impressively complex and detailed images. Thematically, his art deals with some prominent pop culture themes ranging from fairy tales to television and movie references, from alien encounters to not-so-subtle commentary on modern society.
"There is still a persistent reluctance on the part of many of these larger institutions in acknowledging this art, but I really feel they’re shooting themselves in the foot on this point, and fail to realize the broader audience this art has the potential to bring in.
I recently witnessed a rather humorous situation at the Museum Of Art in New York where the gallery displaying surrealist art was jam-packed with onlookers, while the gallery containing work of recent conceptual work was occupied solely by a young mother changing the diaper of her baby infant. Does that not tell you something?"
-Todd Schorr quoted in Arrested Motion
Todd Schorr was born in New York City in 1954 and grew up in Oakland, New Jersey. His parents enrolled him in art classes when he was five, and understandably he claims influences from movies such “King Kong” and the early animated cartoons of Walt Disney and Max Fleischer were (and apparently still are) a driving force in his creative visions.
By the late 1960’s and early 1970’s Schorr was drumming in bands and found further influences in the psychedelic music posters and underground comics coming out of the west coast art scene. In 1970 he visited the Uffizi gallery in Italy and began to formulate an idea of combining cartoons with the painting techniques of the Old Masters.
“Like any artist of worth, it took many long years of struggle and investigative thought along with trial and error as well as constant honing of technique to reach the point where I felt I had created a language which, when spoken well, would command some semblance of purpose. I work in what is best described as a surreal style but filtered through the mind and eyes of what is, for better or worse, uniquely American.”
– Todd Schorr
In 1972 he entered the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of The Arts) with designs towards being a painter, but he was directed instead to the illustration department.
Schorr began doing professional illustration while still in college, and soon after graduating in 1976 he moved to New York City where he provided work for a wide variety of commercial projects including album covers for AC/DC, movie posters for George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, and covers for Time magazine that now reside in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.
Yeah, Schorr's stuff is just uh-maze-ing. Really on a whole other level, there also HUGE. I think that first one I posted is 90-something inches across.
-Comment found on Universal Monster Army
AM: One of the things that people love about your work are your many references to pop culture. Can you tell us a little about the significance of this aspect of your paintings?
Schorr: I consider myself a cultural anthropologist and use pop culture reference points in my work because they strike an emotional resonance with people while also forming a common pictorial language that’s accessible to just about everyone. They get the viewer’s attention and pull them into the little scenarios that I’ve laid out before them on my canvases. Every viewer brings their own personal perceptions to a depiction of say, Fred Flintstone, but the context he’s been placed in and how he’s been altered physically, triggers new associations in the viewer that didn’t exist before. Conversely, if a depiction of a generic cave man was used in the composition, it might not generate the same intimate emotional response. I try to get the essence of the pop culture elements I’m referring to but alter the perception of that image.
Schorr works in acrylic, creating complex narrative paintings of his
favorite childhood characters — Popeye, Tony the Tiger and King Kong —
with a technical bravado borrowed from the Old Masters.
Often, they pay humorous homage to his baby boomer childhood or a
revered painter, as in “Parade of the Damned” (2005), based loosely on
the 1562 Flemish masterpiece by Bruegel called “Mad Meg,” which depicts a
harridan who drives everyone around her crazy.
In Schorr’s version, the monsters all come from the world of pop
culture: Frankenstein and King Kong join a cast of fiends as they
casually make their way toward the mouth of hell, where they’re warmly
welcomed by Morticia of the Addams Family.
Sometimes, his works have a distinctly sociopolitical undertone, as
in “The Hydra of Madison Avenue” (2001), a bacchanalia display of old
Saturday morning TV commercial characters — Tony the Tiger, Smokey Bear,
Mr. Clean — all sprouting from a many-headed beast as the Jolly Green
Giant struts alongside a pink fairy tale castle spewing a cloud of black
smoke.
“There’s an undercurrent of malice going in,” acknowledges Schorr,
speaking by phone from Los Angeles. “The way I’m presenting it, it’s a
serious presentation, but it has an absurdity built into it. I’ve got
these ridiculous cartoon characters, but I’m trying to paint them the
way an Old Master would paint them.”
The painting is at once deeply personal and sociopolitical: “It’s
about advertising, of course,” he says. “You cut the head off, and it
keeps coming back. I have mixed feelings about advertising. I think it’s
a horrible profession, but at the same time it has given us all these
fascinating characters.”
Schorr, 54, grew up in New Jersey, immersed in the world of cartoons,
commercials and Hollywood horror films. But it was after he went to
Europe as a teenager and visited the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy,
that a light bulb went on: “If I could learn how to paint in the
techniques of the Old Masters but use as subject matter my favorite
cartoons, I would have the best of all worlds,” he told himself.
From December 2001 through February 2002 the exhibit “Secret Mystic Rites: Todd Schorr Retrospective” was organized by the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, Florida. The museum used Schorr’s painting “Clash of the Holidays” on the invitation which provoked some outrage, with various South Florida civil leaders accusing Schorr of blasphemy.
Fortunately the controversy died down after meetings between local, state, and museum officials determined that the cost of the county’s heretic burning permit exceeded the city’s budget for the month.
This resulted in a later ruling by the Florida Supreme Court which reduced the sentence for blasphemy from burning at the stake to simple drawing and quartering, under the logic that the threat of fire damage to the Everglades superseded the rights of local preachers to protect their flocks from outside influence.
In most ways, Todd Schorr is living every artist’s
dream: His beastly cartoon paintings are plastered throughout the
Internet, where they are studied, discussed and analyzed for meaning on
hundreds of art blogs.
AM: Many of the younger artists we talk to list you as one of their inspirations or influences. Being a dedicated artist is not easy, especially in this economic time. We know you also had some struggles when you gave up a lucrative illustration career to focus on your own personal art. Any advice for the younger generation of artists out there?
Schorr: If a person has artistic inclinations and has something that by compulsion needs to be expressed, they will somehow find an outlet and hopefully be able to make a living from that talent. Unlike commercial art, where you can target the type of client or market you’d like to work for, the “fine art” gallery world is such an unpredictable mess of agendas and “of the moment” fashion posturing, that it’s folly to suggest any one path to success.
However, here are a couple of important thoughts to consider. Stay true to your vision and what makes you unique while constantly seeking to evolve and improve on previous efforts. Don’t follow trends. The art world is very much tied to fashion and fads, and many young artists easily stray into these traps to gain acceptance and what they perceive as popularity. Consider yourself a very fortunate artist indeed if you manage to find just one or a couple of patrons that truly love your work and stick with you through thick and thin.
Hollywood celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio and David Arquette
collect his massive canvases. Tycoons, such as Mark Parker, the CEO of
Nike, commission his work, while less well-to-do devotees settle for
covering their bodies with tattooed replicas of his iconographic images.
Today Schorr lives the life of a reclusive billionaire, quietly depicting the reality of a twisted cartoon otherworld while tossing scraps of lobster to his trained pack of hyenas which provide a secure front line between himself and the frothing mass of groupies camped at his gates.
Todd Schoor is brilliant!!! If you like his style, check out paintings by Robert Williams. Robt. Williams pioneered the multi-layered, low-brow painting style.
-Comment found on Universal Monster Army
There may not be a more dedicated and industrious artist than Todd Schorr. His work ethic is legendary, his output exemplified by dogged attention to detail and skill in technique.
Such a notable career, when taken in sum, encapsulates a unique, personal vision of a conjured world in which he establishes surreal appeal by creating phantasmagorical images that mesmerize the viewer in their meticulously painted execution.
Although the label “lowbrow” may be shunned by other artists of his generation, Schorr actually validates the colloquial term and summarizes the genre’s basic traits. In other words, he takes what are often considered to be low cultural references and elevates them into significant artifacts that pulsate with intellectual viability.
Yeah, Robert Williams is pretty much THE MAN when it comes to lowbrow art, he kind of coined the term (as it applies to this movement of art) back in the early '80s, not to mention his stuff is weird with a capital W. I'd post some of his work but it rarely prominently features movie monsters.
-Comment found on Universal Monster Army
Schorr is a seminal figure in what’s known as the lowbrow school of
art, an underground movement centered in Los Angeles that draws on an
iconography of cartoon characters and baby boomer images from TV and pop
culture. Other artists in the movement, which is also known as pop
surrealism, include Camille Rose Garcia, Gary Baseman and Mark Ryden.
Since 1994, they have been steadfastly promoted in the pages of
Juxtapoz Arts & Culture Magazine, a pop surrealist San
Francisco-based publication.
Todd Schorr’s artistic journey is one that hardly conforms to the time-honored stereotype of Bohemian artist. It is rather a post-war tale bracketed by an America infatuated with the limitless potential of consumerism.
His formative years were spent in a world surrounded by the atomic and space ages, by Saturday morning cartoons and racks of comic books at the local drug store, a land populated by Revell models, Mad Magazine, Testors glue, Mickey Mouse and Rat Fink.
My kind of guy.
Further fueling his developing image bank were the seemingly endless icons from television’s early years: Robbie the Robot, Mighty Joe Young and reel upon reel of animated toons from the likes of Tex Avery, George Pal and Max Fleischer.
The compulsion to replicate these characters led to a formal art education and exposure to a new set of influences drawn from the world of advertising and commercial art.
“The artwork I respond to is art that’s entertaining but also (makes)
you feel the hairs on the back of your neck stand up,” he says. “It
should be kind of thrilling. A total visceral response.”
Indeed, he says, if those Flemish Old Masters were living today,
they’d be painting cartoons too. And, who knows, he adds, but maybe art
lovers of the future will revere paintings of King Kong, Tony the Tiger
and Cap’n Crunch.
“This work is going to be tremendously important 100 years from now,” Schorr asserts. “It’s so much an art of our time and place.
Movies that Inspired Me
Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
My Poetry
Art that Moves Me
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
This is a lovely short story by Ray Bradbury. It's a fun, and easy quick read. The arrival in a small town of a stranger who calls himself 'Charles Dickens' makes a magical and lasting change in the lives of an imaginative 12-year-old boy and a loving young woman. It's a great read and fun escapist reading.
It is free to read and you do not have to jump through any hoops to register, apply to bore through a pay-wall, or give out any personal information. Free means free. Enjoy.
Imagine a summer that would never end.
Nineteen twenty-nine.
Imagine a boy who would never grow up.
Me.
Imagine a barber who was never young.
Mr. Wyneski.
Imagine a dog that would live forever.
Mine.
Imagine a small town, the kind that isn’t lived in anymore.
Ready?
Begin…
Green Town, Illinois … Late June.
Dog barking outside a one-chair barbershop.
Inside, Mr. Wyneski, circling his victim, a customer snoozing in the steambath drowse of noon.
Inside, me, Ralph Spaulding, a boy of some twelve years,
standing still as an iron Civil War statue, listening to the hot wind,
feeling all that hot summer dust out there, a bakery world where nobody
could be bad or good, boys just lay gummed to dogs, dogs used boys for
pillows under trees that lazed with leaves which whispered in despair:
Nothing Will Ever Happen Again.
The only motion anywhere was the cool water dripping from the huge coffin-sized ice block in the hardware store window.
The only cool person in miles was Miss Frostbite, the
traveling magician’s assistant, tucked into that lady-shaped long cavity
hollowed in the ice block displayed for three days now without they
said, her breathing, eating, or talking. That last, I thought, must have
been terrible hard on a woman.
Nothing moved in the street but the barbershop striped
pole which turned slowly to show its red, white, and then red again,
slid up out of nowhere to vanish nowhere, a motion between two
mysteries.
“…hey…”
I pricked my ears.
“…something’s coming…”
“Only the noon train, Ralph.” Mr. Wyneski snicked his
jackdaw scissors, peering in his customer’s ear. “Only the train that
comes at noon.”
“No…” I gasped, eyes shut, leaning. “Something’s really coming…”
I heard the far whistle wail, lonesome, sad. enough to pull your soul out of your body.
“You feel it, don’t you, Dog?”
Dog barked.
Mr. Wyneski sniffed. “What can a dog feel?”
“Big things. Important things. Circumstantial coincidences. Collisions you can’t escape. Dog says. I say. We say.”
“That makes four of you.
Some team.” Mr. Wyneski turned from the summer-dead man in the white
porcelain chair. “Now, Ralph, my problem is hair. Sweep.”
I swept a ton of hair. “Gosh, you’d think this stuff just grew up out of the floor.”
Mr. Wyneski watched my broom. “Right! I didn’t cut all
that. Darn stuff just grows, I swear, lying there. Leave it a week, come
back, and you need hip boots to trod a path.” He pointed with his
scissors. “Look. You ever see so many
shades, hues, and tints of forelocks and chin fuzz? There’s Mr.
Tompkins’s receding hairline. There’s Charlie Smith’s topknot. And here,
here’s all that’s left of Mr. Harry Joe Flynn.”
I stared at Mr. Wyneski as if he had just read from Revelations. “Gosh, Mr. Wyneski, I guess you know everything in the world!”
“Just about.”
“I—I’m going to grow up and be—a barber!”
Mr. Wyneski, to hide his pleasure, got busy.
“Then watch this hedgehog, Ralph, peel an eye. Elbows thus, wrists so! Make the scissors talk! Customers appreciate. Sound twice as busy as you are. Snickety-snick, boy, snickety-snick. Learned this from the French! Oh, yes, the French! They do prowl about the chair light on their toes, and the sharp scissors whispering and nibbling, Ralph, nibbling and whispering, you hear!”
“Boy!” I said, at his elbow, right in with the whispers
and nibbles, then stopped: for the wind blew a wail way off in summer
country, so sad, so strange.
“There it is again. The train. And something on the train…”
“Noon train don’t stop here.”
“But I got this feeling—”
“The hair’s going to grab me. Ralph…”
I swept hair.
After a long while I said, “I’m thinking of changing my name.”
Mr. Wyneski sighed. The summer-dead customer stayed dead.
“What’s wrong with you today, boy?”
“It’s not me. It’s the name is out of hand. Just listen. Ralph.” I grrred it. “Rrrralph.”
“Ain’t exactly harp music…”
“Sounds like a mad dog.” I caught myself.
“No offense, Dog.”
Mr. Wyneski glanced down. “He seems pretty calm about the whole subject.”
“Ralph’s dumb. Gonna change my name by tonight.”
Mr. Wyneski mused. “Julius for Caesar? Alexander for the Great?”
“Don’t care what. Help me, huh, Mr. Wyneski? Find me a name…”
Dog sat up. I dropped the broom.
For way down in the hot cinder railroad yards a train
furnaced itself in, all pomp, all fire-blast shout and tidal churn,
summer in its iron belly bigger than the summer outside.
“Here it comes!”
“There it goes,” said Mr. Wyneski.
“No, there it doesn’t go!”
It was Mr. Wyneski’s turn to almost drop his scissors.
“Goshen. Darn noon train’s putting on the brakes!”
We heard the train stop.
“How many people getting off the train, Dog?”
Dog barked once.
Mr. Wyneski shifted uneasily. “U.S. Mail bags—”
“No … a man! Walking light.
Not much luggage. Heading for our house. A new boarder at Grandma’s, I
bet. And he’ll take the empty room right next to you, Mr. Wyneski!
Right, Dog?”
Dog barked.
“That dog talks too much,” said Mr. Wyneski.
“I just gotta go see, Mr. Wyneski. Please?”
The far footsteps faded in the hot and silent streets.
Mr. Wyneski shivered.
“A goose just stepped on my grave.”
Then he added, almost sadly:
“Get along, Ralph.”
“Name ain’t Ralph.”
“Whatchamacallit … run see … come tell the worst.”
“Oh, thanks, Mr. Wyneski, thanks!”
I ran. Dog ran. Up a street, along an alley, around
back, we ducked in the ferns by my grandma’s house. “Down, boy.” I
whispered. “Here the Big Event comes, whatever it is!”
And down the street and up the walk and up the steps at a
brisk jaunt came this man who swung a cane and carried a carpetbag and
had long brown-gray hair and silken mustaches and a goatee, politeness
all about him like a flock of birds.
On the porch near the old rusty chain swing, among the potted geraniums, he surveyed Green Town.
Far away, maybe, he heard the insect hum from the
barbershop, where Mr. Wyneski, who would soon be his enemy, told
fortunes by the lumpy heads under his hands as he buzzed the electric
clippers. Far away, maybe, he could hear the empty library where the
golden dust slid down the raw sunlight and way in back someone scratched
and tapped and scratched forever with pen and ink, a quiet woman like a
great lonely mouse burrowed away. And she was to be part of this new
man’s life, too, but right now…
The stranger removed his tall moss-green hat, mopped his brow, and not looking at anything but the hot blind sky said:
“Hello, boy. Hello, dog.”
Dog and I rose up among the ferns.
“Heck. How’d you know where we were hiding?”
The stranger peered into his hat for the answer. “In
another incarnation, I was a boy. Time before that, if memory serves, I
was a more than usually happy dog. But…!” His cane rapped the cardboard
sign BOARD AND ROOM thumbtacked on the porch rail. “Does the sign say true, boy?”
“Best rooms on the block.”
“Beds?”
“Mattresses so deep you sink down and drown the third time, happy.”
“Boarders at table?”
“Talk just enough, not too much.”
“Food?”
“Hot biscuits every morning, peach pie noon, shortcake every supper!”
The stranger inhaled, exhaled those savors.
“I’ll sign my soul away!”
“I beg your pardon?!” Grandma was suddenly at the screen door, scowling out.
“A manner of speaking, ma’am.” The stranger turned. “Not meant to sound un-Christian.”
And he was inside, him talking, Grandma talking, him writing and flourishing the pen on the registry book, and me and Dog inside, breathless, watching, spelling:
“C.H.”
“Read upside down, do you, boy?” said the stranger, merrily, giving pause with the inky pen.
“Yes, sir!”
On he wrote. On I spelled:
“A.R.L.E.S. Charles!”
“Right.”
Grandma peered at the calligraphy. “Oh, what a fine hand.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” On the pen scurried. And on I chanted. “D.I.C.K.E.N.S.”
I faltered and stopped. The pen stopped. The stranger tilted his head and closed one eye, watchful of me.
“Yes?” He dared me, “What, what?”
“Dickens!” I cried.
“Good!”
“Charles Dickens, Grandma!”
“I can read, Ralph. A nice name…”
“Nice?” I said, agape. “It’s great! But … I thought you were—”
“Dead?” The stranger laughed. “No. Alive, in fine fettle, and glad to meet a recognizer, fan, and fellow reader here!”
And we were up the stairs, Grandma bringing fresh towels
and pillowcases and me carrying the carpetbag, gasping, and us meeting
Grandpa, a great ship of a man, sailing down the other way.
“Grandpa,” I said, watching his face for shock. “I want you to meet … Mr. Charles Dickens!”
Grandpa stopped for a long breath, looked at the new
boarder from top to bottom, then reached out, took hold of the man’s
hand, shook it firmly, and said:
“Any friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s is a friend of mine!”
Mr. Dickens fell back from the effusion, recovered,
bowed, said. “Thank you, sir,” and went on up the stairs, while Grandpa
winked, pinched my cheek, and left me standing there, stunned.
In the tower cupola room, with windows bright, open, and
running with cool creeks of wind in all directions, Mr. Dickens drew
off his horse-carriage coat and nodded at the carpetbag.
“Anywhere will do, Pip. Oh, you don’t mind I call you Pip, eh?”
“Pip?!” My cheeks burned, my face glowed with astonishing happiness. “Oh, boy. Oh, no, sir. Pip’s fine!”
Grandma cut between us. “Here are your clean linens, Mr…?”
“Dickens, ma’am.” Our boarder patted his pockets, each in turn. “Dear me, Pip, I seem to be fresh out of pads and pencils. Might it be possible—”
He saw one of my hands steal up to find something behind
my ear. “I’ll be darned,” I said, “a yellow Ticonderoga Number 2!” My
other hand slipped to my back pants pocket. “And hey, an Iron-Face
Indian Ring-Back Notepad Number 12!”
“Extraordinary!”
“Extraordinary!”
Mr. Dickens wheeled about, surveying the world from each
and every window, speaking now north, now north by east, now east, now
south:
“I’ve traveled two long weeks with an idea. Bastille Day. Do you know it?”
“The French Fourth of July?”
“Remarkable boy! By Bastille Day this book must be in
full flood. Will you help me breach the tide gates of the Revolution,
Pip?”
“With these?” I looked at the pad and pencil in my hands.
“Lick the pencil tip, boy!”
I licked.
“Top of the page: the title. Title.” Mr. Dickens mused,
head down, rubbing his chin whiskers. “Pip, what’s a rare fine title for
a novel that happens half in London, half in Paris?”
“A—” I ventured.
“Yes?”
“A Tale,” I went on.
“Yes?!”
“A Tale of … Two Cities?!”
“Madame!” Grandma looked up as he spoke. “This boy is a genius!”
“I read about this day in the Bible,” said Grandma. “Everything Ends by noon.”
“Put it down, Pip.” Mr. Dickens tapped my pad. “Quick. A Tale of Two Cities. Then, mid-page. Book the First. ‘Recalled to Life.’ Chapter 1. ‘The Period.’”
I scribbled. Grandma worked. Mr. Dickens squinted at the sky and at last intoned:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it
was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch
of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the Season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the
winter—”
“My,” said Grandma, “you speak fine.”
“Madame.” The author nodded, then, eyes shut, snapped his fingers to remember, on the air. “Where was I, Pip?”
“It was the winter,” I said, “of despair.”
Very late in the
afternoon I heard Grandma calling someone named Ralph, Ralph, down
below. I didn’t know who that was. I was writing hard.
A minute later, Grandpa called, “Pip!”
I jumped. “Yes, sir!”
“Dinnertime, Pip,” said Grandpa, up the stairwell.
I sat down at the table, hair wet, hands damp. I looked over at Grandpa. “How did you know … Pip?”
“Heard the name fall out the window an hour ago.”
“Pip?” said Mr. Wyneski, just come in, sitting down.
“Boy,” I said. “I been everywhere this afternoon. The
Dover Coach on the Dover Road. Paris! Traveled so much I got writer’s
cramp! I—”
“Pip” said Mr. Wyneski, again.
Grandpa came warm and easy to my rescue.
“When I was twelve, changed my name—on several
occasions.” He counted the tines on his fork. “Dick. That was Dead-Eye
Dick. And … John. That was for Long John Silver. Then: Hyde. That was
for the other half of Jekyll—”
“I never had any other name except Bernard Samuel Wyneski,” said Mr. Wyneski, his eyes still fixed to me.
“None?” cried Grandpa, startled.
“None.”
“Have you proof of childhood, then, sir?” asked Grandpa. “Or are you a natural phenomenon, like a ship becalmed at sea?”
“Eh?” said Mr. Wyneski.
Grandpa gave up and handed him his full plate.
“Fall to, Bernard Samuel, fall to.”
Mr. Wyneski let his plate lie. “Dover Coach…?”
“With Mr. Dickens, of course,” supplied Grandpa.
“Bernard Samuel, we have a new boarder, a novelist, who is starting a
new book and has chosen Pip there, Ralph, to work as his secretary—”
“Worked all afternoon,” I said. “Made a quarter!”
I slapped my hand to my mouth. A swift dark cloud had come over Mr. Wyneski’s face.
“A novelist? Named Dickens? Surely you don’t believe—”
“I believe what a man tells me until he tells me otherwise, then I believe that. Pass the butter,” said Grandpa.
The butter was passed in silence.
“…hell’s fires…” Mr. Wyneski muttered.
I slunk low in my chair.
Grandpa, slicing the chicken, heaping the plates, said,
“A man with a good demeanor has entered our house. He says his name is
Dickens. For all I know that is his name. He implies
he is writing a book. I pass his door, look in, and, yes, he is indeed
writing. Should I run tell him not to? It is obvious he needs to set the
book down—”
“A Tale of Two Cities!” I said.
“A Tale!” cried Mr. Wyneski, outraged, “of Two—”
“Hush,” said Grandma.
For down the stairs and now at the door of the dining
room there was the man with the long hair and the fine goatee and
mustaches, nodding, smiling, peering in at us doubtful and saying,
“Friends…?”
“Mr. Dickens,” I said, trying to save the day. “I want you to meet Mr. Wyneski, the greatest barber in the world—”
The two men looked at each other for a long moment.
“Mr. Dickens,” said Grandpa. “Will you lend us your talent, sir, for grace?”
We bowed our heads. Mr. Wyneski did not.
Mr. Dickens looked at him gently.
Muttering, the barber glanced at the floor.
Mr. Dickens prayed:
“O Lord of the bounteous table, O Lord who furnishes
forth an infinite harvest for your most respectful servants gathered
here in loving humiliation, O Lord who garnishes our feast with the
bright radish and the resplendent chicken, who sets before us the wine
of the summer season, lemonade, and maketh us humble before simple
potato pleasures, the lowborn onion and, in the finale, so my nostrils
tell me, the bread of vast experiments and fine success, the highborn
strawberry shortcake, most beautifully smothered and amiably drowned in
fruit from your own warm garden patch, for these, and this good company,
much thanks. Amen.”
“Amen,” said everyone but Mr. Wyneski.
We waited.
“Amen, I guess,” he said.
O what a summer that was!
None like it before in Green Town history.
I never got up so early so happy ever in my life! Out of
bed at five minutes to, in Paris by one minute after … six in the
morning the English Channel boat from Calais, the White Cliffs, sky a
blizzard of seagulls, Dover, then the London Coach and London Bridge by
noon! Lunch and lemonade out under the trees with Mr. Dickens, Dog
licking our cheeks to cool us, then back to Paris and tea at four and…
“Bring up the cannon, Pip!”
“Yes, sir!”
“Mob the Bastille!”
“Yes, sir!”
And the guns were fired and the mobs ran and there I
was, Mr. C. Dickens A-l First Class Green Town, Illinois, secretary, my
eyes bugging, my ears popping, my chest busting with joy, for I dreamt
of being a writer some day, too, and here I was unraveling a tale with
the very finest best.
“Madame Defarge, oh how she sat and knitted, knitted, sat—”
I looked up to find Grandma knitting in the window.
“Sidney Carton, what and who was he? A man of sensibility, a reading man of gentle thought and capable action…”
Grandpa strolled by mowing the grass.
Drums sounded beyond the hills with guns; a summer storm cracked and dropped unseen walls…
Mr. Wyneski?
Somehow I neglected his shop, somehow I forgot the
mysterious barber pole that came up from nothing and spiraled away to
nothing, and the fabulous hair that grew on his white tile floor…
So Mr. Wyneski then had to come home every night to find that writer with all the long hair in need of cutting, standing there at the same table thanking the Lord for this, that, and t’other, and Mr. Wyneski not thankful. For there I sat staring at Mr. Dickens like he was God until one night:
“Shall we say grace?” said Grandma.
“Mr. Wyneski is out brooding in the yard,” said Grandpa.
“Brooding?” I glanced guiltily from the window.
Grandpa tilted his chair back so he could see.
“Brooding’s the word. Saw him kick the rose bush, kick
the green ferns by the porch, decide against kicking the apple tree. God
made it too firm. There, he just jumped on a dandelion. Oh, oh. Here he
comes, Moses crossing a Black Sea of bile.”
The door slammed. Mr. Wyneski stood at the head of the table.
“I’ll say grace tonight!”
He glared at Mr. Dickens.
“Why, I mean,” said Grandma. “Yes. Please.”
Mr. Wyneski shut his eyes tight and began his prayer of destruction:
“O Lord, who delivered me a fine June and a less fine July, help me to get through August somehow.
“O Lord, deliver me from mobs and riots in the streets
of London and Paris which drum through my room night and morn, chief
members of said riot being one boy who walks in his sleep, a man with a
strange name and a Dog who barks after the ragtag and bobtail.
“Give me strength to resist the cries of Fraud, Thief, Fool, and Bunk Artists which rise in my mouth.
“Help me not to run shouting all the way to the Police
Chief to yell that in all probability the man who shares our simple
bread has a true name of Red Joe Pyke from Wilkesboro, wanted for
counterfeiting life, or Bull Hammer from Hornbill, Arkansas, much
desired for mean spitefulness and penny-pilfering in Oskaloosa.
“Lord, deliver the innocent boys of this world from the fell clutch of those who would tomfool their credibility.
“And Lord, help me to say, quietly, and with all
deference to the lady present, that if one Charles Dickens is not on the
noon train tomorrow bound for Potters Grave, Lands End, or Kankakee, I
shall like Delilah, with malice, shear the black lamb and fry his
mutton-chop whiskers for twilight dinners and late midnight snacks.
“I ask, Lord, not mercy for the mean, but simple justice for the malignant.
“All those agreed, say ‘Amen.’”
He sat down and stabbed a potato.
There was a long moment with everyone frozen.
And then Mr. Dickens, eyes shut said, moaning:
“Ohhhhhhhhhh…!”
It was a moan, a cry, a despair so long and deep it sounded like the train way off in the country the day this man had arrived.
“Mr. Dickens,” I said.
But I was too late.
He was on his feet, blind, wheeling, touching the
furniture, holding to the wall, clutching at the doorframe, blundering
into the hall, groping up the stairs.
“Ohhhhh…”
It was the long cry of a man gone over a cliff into Eternity.
It seemed we sat waiting to hear him hit bottom.
Far off in the hills in the upper part of the house, his door banged shut.
My soul turned over and died.
“Charlie.” I said. “Oh, Charlie.”
Late that night, Dog howled.
And the reason he howled was that sound, that similar, muffled cry from up in the tower cupola room.
“Holy Cow,” I said. “Call the plumber. Everything’s down the drain.”
Mr. Wyneski strode by on the sidewalk, walking nowhere, off and gone.
“That’s his fourth time around the block.” Grandpa struck a match and lit his pipe.
“Mr. Wyneski!” I called.
No answer. The footsteps went away.
“Boy oh boy, I feel like I lost a war,” I said.
“No, Ralph, beg pardon, Pip,” said Grandpa, sitting down
on the step with me. “You just changed generals in midstream is all.
And now one of the generals is so unhappy he’s turned mean.”
“Mr. Wyneski? I—I almost hate him!”
Grandpa puffed gently on his pipe. “I don’t think he
even knows why he is so unhappy and mean. He has had a tooth pulled
during the night by a mysterious dentist and now his tongue is aching
around the empty place where the tooth was.”
“We’re not in church, Grandpa.”
“Cut the Parables, huh? In simple words, Ralph, you used
to sweep the hair off that man’s shop floor. And he’s a man with no
wife, no family, just a job. A man with no family needs someone
somewhere in the world, whether he knows it or not.”
“I,” I said. “I’ll wash the barbershop windows tomorrow. I-I’ll oil the red-and-white striped pole so it spins like crazy.”
“I know you will, son.”
A train went by in the night.
Dog howled.
Mr. Dickens answered in a strange cry from his room.
I went to bed and heard the town clock strike one and then two and at last three.
Then it was I heard the soft crying. I went out in the hall to listen by our boarder’s door.
“Mr. Dickens?”
The soft sound stopped.
The door was unlocked. I dared open it.
“Mr. Dickens?”
And there he lay in the moonlight, tears streaming from his eyes, eyes wide open staring at the ceiling, motionless.
“Mr. Dickens?”
“Nobody by that name here,” said he. His head moved side to side. “Nobody by that name in this room in this bed in this world.”
“You,” I said. “You’re Charlie Dickens.”
“You ought to know better,” was the mourned reply. “Long after midnight, moving on toward morning.”
“All I know is,” I said, “I seen you writing every day. I heard you talking every night.”
“Right, right.”
“And you finish one book and start another, and write a fine calligraphy sort of hand.”
“I do that.” A nod. “Oh yes, by the demon possessions, I do.”
“So!” I circled the bed. “What call you got to feel sorry for yourself, a world-famous author?”
“You know and I know, I’m Mr. Nobody from Nowhere, on my way to Eternity with a dead flashlight and no candles.”
“Hells bells,” I said. I started for the door. I was mad
because he wasn’t holding up his end. He was ruining a grand summer.
“Good night!” I rattled the doorknob.
“Wait!”
It was such a terrible soft cry of need and almost pain, I dropped my hand, but I didn’t turn.
“Pip,” said the old man in the bed.
“Yeah?” I said, grouching.
“Let’s both be quiet. Sit down.”
I slowly sat on the spindly wooden chair by the night table.
“Talk to me, Pip.”
“Holy Cow, at three—”
“—in the morning, yes. Oh, it’s a fierce awful time of
night. A long way back to sunset, and ten thousand miles on to dawn. We
have need of friends then. Friend, Pip? Ask me things.”
“Like what?”
“I think you know.”
I brooded a moment and sighed. “Okay, okay. Who are you?”
He was very quiet for a moment lying there in his bed
and then traced the words on the ceiling with a long invisible tip of
his nose and said, “I’m a man who could never fit his dream.”
“What?”
“I mean, Pip, I never became what I wanted to be.”
I was quiet now, too. “What’d you want to be?”
“A writer.”
“Did you try?”
“Try!” he cried, and almost gagged on a strange wild
laugh. “Try,” he said, controlling himself. “Why Lord of Mercy, son, you
never saw so much spit, ink, and sweat fly. I wrote my way through an
ink factory, broke and busted a paper company, ruined and dilapidated
six dozen typewriters, devoured and scribbled to the bone ten thousand
Ticonderoga Soft Lead pencils.”
“Wow!”
“You may well say Wow.”
“What did you write?”
“What didn’t I write. The poem. The essay. The play tragique. The farce. The short story. The novel. A thousand words a day, boy, every day for thirty years, no day passed I did not scriven and assault the page. Millions of words passed from my fingers onto paper and it was all bad.”
“It couldn’t have been!”
“It was. Not mediocre, not
passing fair. Just plain outright mudbath bad. Friends knew it, editors
knew it, teachers knew it, publishers knew it, and one strange fine day
about four in the afternoon, when I was fifty, I knew it.”
“But you can’t write thirty years without—”
“Stumbling upon excellence? Striking a chord? Gaze long,
gaze hard, Pip, look upon a man of peculiar talent, outstanding
ability, the only man in history who put down five million words without
slapping to life one small base of a story that might rear up on its
frail legs and cry Eureka! we’ve done it!”
“You never sold one story!?”
“Not a two line joke. Not a throwaway newspaper sonnet.
Not a want ad or obit. Not a home-bottled autumn pickle recipe. Isn’t
that rare? To be so outstandingly dull, so ridiculously inept, that
nothing ever brought a chuckle, caused a tear, raised a temper, or
discharged a blow. And do you know what I did on the day I discovered I
would never be a writer? I killed myself.”
“Killed?!”
“Did away with, destroyed. How? I packed me up and took
me away on a long train ride and sat on the back smoking-car platform a
long time in the night and then one by one let the confetti of my
manuscripts fly like panicked birds away down the tracks. I scattered a
novel across Nebraska, my Homeric legends over North, my love sonnets
through South Dakota. I abandoned my familiar essays in the men’s room
at the Harvey House in Clear Springs, Idaho. The late summer wheatfields
knew my prose. Grand fertilizer, it probably jumped up bumper crops of
corn long after I passed. I rode two trunks of my soul on that long
summer’s journey, celebrating my badly served self. And one by one, slow
at first, and then faster, faster, over I chucked them, story after
story, out, out of my arms out of my head, out of my life, and down they
went, sunk drowning night rivers of prairie dust, in lost continents of
sand and lonely rock. And the train wallowed around a curve in a great
wail of darkness and release, and I opened my fingers and let the last
stillborn darlings fall….
“When I reached the far terminus of the line, the trunks
were empty. I had drunk much, eaten little, wept on occasion in my
private room, but had heaved away my anchors, deadweights, and dreams,
and came to the sliding soft chuffing end of my
journey, praise God, in a kind of noble peace and certainty. I felt
reborn. I said to myself, why, what’s this, what’s this? I’m—I’m a new
man.”
He saw it all on the ceiling, and I saw it, too, like a movie run up the wall in the moonlit night.
“I-I’m a new man I said, and when I got off the train at
the end of that long summer of disposal and sudden rebirth, I looked in
a fly-specked, rain-freckled gum-machine mirror at a lost depot in
Peachgum, Missouri, and my beard grown long in two months of travel and
my hair gone wild with wind that combed it this way sane, that way mad,
and I peered and stood back and exclaimed softly, ‘Why, Charlie Dickens,
is that you?!’
The man in the bed laughed softly.
“‘Why, Charlie,’ said I, ‘Mr. Dickens, there you are!’ And the reflection in the mirror cried out, ‘Dammit, sir, who else would it be!? Stand back. I’m off to a great lecture!’”
“Did you really say that, Mr. Dickens?”
“God’s pillars and temples of truth, Pip. And I got out
of his way! And I strode through a strange town and I knew who I was at
last and grew fevers thinking on what I might do in my lifetime now
reborn and all that grand fine work ahead! For, Pip, this thing must
have been growing. All those years of writing and snuffing up defeat,
my old subconscious must have been whispering, ‘Just you wait. Things
will be black midnight bad but then in the nick of time, I’ll save you!’
“And maybe the thing that saved me was the thing ruined
me in the first place: respect for my elders; the grand moguls and tall
muckymucks in the lush literary highlands and me in the dry river bottom
with my canoe.
“For, oh God, Pip, how I devoured Tolstoy, drank
Dostoevsky, feasted on De Maupassant, had wine and chicken picnics with
Flaubert and Molière. I gazed at gods too high. I read too much! So, when my work vanished, theirs stayed. Suddenly I found I could not forget their books, Pip!”
“Couldn’t?”
“I mean I could not forget any letter of any word of any
sentence or any paragraph of any book ever passed under these hungry
omnivorous eyes!”
“Photographic memory!”
“Bull’s-eye! All of Dickens, Hardy, Austen, Poe,
Hawthorne, trapped in this old box Brownie waiting to be printed off my
tongue, all those years, never knew, Pip, never guessed, I had did it
all away. Ask me to speak in tongues. Kipling is
one. Thackery another. Weigh flesh. I’m Shylock. Snuff out the light,
I’m Othello. All, all, Pip, all!”
“And then? And so?”
“Why then and so, Pip, I looked another time in that fly-specked mirror and said, ‘Mr. Dickens, all this being true, when do you write your first book?’
“‘Now!’ I cried. And bought fresh paper and ink and have
been delirious and joyful, lunatic and happy frantic ever since,
writing all the books of my own dear self, me, I, Charles Dickens, one
by one.
“I have traveled the continental vastness of the United
States of North America and settled me in to write and act, act and
write, lecturing here, pondering there, half in and then half out of my
mania, known and unknown, lingering here to finish Copperfield, loitering there for Dombey and Son,
turning up for tea with Marley’s Ghost on some pale Christmas noon.
Sometimes I lie whole snowbound winters in little whistle stops and no
one there guessing that Charlie Dickens bides hibernation there, then
pop forth like the ottermole of spring and so move on. Sometimes I stay
whole summers in one town before I’m driven off. Oh, yes, driven. For
such as your Mr. Wyneski cannot forgive the fantastic, Pip, no matter
how particularly practical that fantastic be.
“For he has no humor, boy.
He does not see that we all do what we must to survive, survive.
“Some laugh, some cry, some bang the world with fists, some run, but it all sums up the same: they make do.
“The world swarms with people, each one drowning, but each swimming a different stroke to the far shore.
“And Mr. Wyneski? He makes do with scissors and understands not my inky pen and littered papers on which I would flypaper-catch my borrowed English soul.”
Mr. Dickens put his feet out of bed and reached for his carpetbag.
“So I must pick up and go.”
I grabbed the bag first.
“No! You can’t leave! You haven’t finished the book!”
“Pip, dear boy, you haven’t been listening—”
“The world’s waiting! You can’t just quit in the middle of Two Cities!”
He took the bag quietly from me.
“Pip, Pip…”
“You can’t, Charlie!”
He looked into my face and it must have been so white hot he flinched away.
“I’m waiting,” I cried. “They’re waiting!”
“They…?”
“The mob at the Bastille. Paris! London. The Dover sea. The guillotine!”
I ran to throw all the windows even wider as if the
night wind and the moonlight might bring in sounds and shadows to crawl
on the rug and sneak in his eyes, and the curtains blew out in phantom
gestures and I swore I heard, Charlie heard, the crowds, the coach
wheels, the great slicing downfall of the cutting blades and the cabbage
heads falling and battle songs and all that on the wind…
“Oh, Pip, Pip…”
Tears welled from his eyes.
I had my pencil out and my pad.
“Well?” I said.
“Where were we, this afternoon, Pip?”
“Madame Defarge, knitting.”
He let the carpetbag fall. He sat on the edge of the bed
and his hands began to tumble, weave, knit, motion, tie and untie, and
he looked and saw his hands and spoke and I wrote and he spoke again,
stronger, and stronger, all through the rest of the night…
“Madame Defarge … yes … well. Take this, Pip. She—”
“Morning, Mr. Dickens!”
I flung myself into the dining-room chair. Mr. Dickens was already half through his stack of pancakes.
I took one bite and then saw the even greater stack of pages lying on the table between us.
“Mr. Dickens?” I said. “The Tale of Two Cities. It’s … finished?”
“Done.” Mr. Dickens ate, eyes down. “Got up at six. Been working steady. Done. Finished. Through.”
“Wow!” I said.
A train whistle blew. Charlie sat up, then rose
suddenly, to leave the rest of his breakfast and hurry out in the hall. I
heard the front door slam and tore out on the porch to see Mr. Dickens
half down the walk, carrying his carpetbag.
He was walking so fast I had to run to circle round and round him as he headed for the rail depot.
“Mr. Dickens, the book’s finished, yeah, but not published yet!”
“You be my executor, Pip.”
He fled. I pursued, gasping.
“What about David Copperfield?! Little Dorrit?!”
“Friends of yours, Pip?”
“Yours, Mr. Dickens, Charlie, oh, gosh, if you don’t write them, they’ll never live.”
“They’ll get on somehow.” He vanished around a corner. I jumped after.
“Charlie, wait. I’ll give you—a new title! Pickwick Papers, sure, Pickwick Papers!”
The train was pulling into the station.
Charlie ran fast.
“And after that, Bleak House, Charlie, and Hard Times and Great—Mr. Dickens, listen—Expectations! Oh, my gosh!”
For he was far ahead now and I could only yell after him:
“Oh, blast, go on! get off! get away! You know what I’m
going to do!? You don’t deserve reading! You don’t! So right now, and
from here on, see if I even bother to finish reading Tale of Two Cities! Not me! Not this one! No!”
The bell was tolling in the station. The steam was
rising. But, Mr. Dickens had slowed. He stood in the middle of the
sidewalk. I came up to stare at his back.
“Pip,” he said softly. “You mean what you just said?”
“You!” I cried. “You’re nothing but—” I searched in my
mind and seized a thought: “—a blot of mustard, some undigested bit of
raw potato—!”
“‘Bah, Humbug, Pip?’”
“Humbug! I don’t give a blast what happens to Sidney Carton!”
“Why, it’s a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done, Pip. You must read it.”
“Why!?”
He turned to look at me with great sad eyes.
“Because I wrote it for you.”
It took all my strength to half-yell back: “So—?”
“So,” said Mr. Dickens, “I have just missed my train. Forty minutes till the next one—”
“Then you got time,” I said.
“Time for what?”
“To meet someone. Meet them, Charlie, and I promise I’ll finish reading your book. In there. In there, Charlie.”
He pulled back.
“That place? The library?!”
“Ten minutes, Mr. Dickens, give me ten minutes, just ten, Charlie. Please.”
“Ten?”
And at last, like a blind man, he let me lead him up the library steps and half-fearful, sidle in.
The library was like a stone quarry where no rain had fallen in ten thousand years.
Way off in that direction: silence.
Way off in that direction: hush.
It was the time between things finished and things begun. Nobody died here.
Nobody was born. The library, and all its books, just were.
We waited, Mr. Dickens and I, on the edge of the silence.
Mr. Dickens trembled. And I suddenly remembered I had
never seen him here all summer. He was afraid I might take him near the
fiction shelves and see all his books, written, done, finished, printed,
stamped, bound, borrowed, read, repaired, and shelved.
But I wouldn’t be that dumb. Even so, he took my elbow and whispered:
“Pip, what are we doing here? Let’s go. There’s…”
“Listen!” I hissed.
And a long way off in the stacks somewhere, there was a sound like a moth turning over in its sleep.
“Bless me,” Mr. Dickens’s eyes widened. “I know that sound.”
“Sure!”
“It’s the sound,” he said, holding his breath, then nodding, “of someone writing.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Writing with a pen. And … and writing…”
“What?”
“Poetry,” gasped Mr. Dickens. “That’s it. Someone off
there in a room, how many fathoms deep, Pip, I swear, writing a poem.
There! Eh? Flourish, flourish, scratch, flourish on, on, on, that’s not
figures, Pip, not numerals, not dusty-dry facts, you feel it sweep, feel it scurry? A poem, by God, yes, sir, no doubt, a poem!”
“Ma’am,” I called.
The moth-sound ceased.
“Don’t stop her!” hissed Mr. Dickens. “Middle of inspiration. Let her go!”
The moth-scratch started again.
Flourish, flourish, scratch, on, on, stop. Flourish,
flourish. I bobbed my head. I moved my lips, as did Mr. Dickens, both of
us suspended, held, leant forward on the cool marble air listening to
the vaults and stacks and echoes in the subterrane.
Flourish, flourish, scratch, on, on.
Silence.
“There.” Mr. Dickens nudged me.
“Ma’am!” I called ever so urgently soft.
And something rustled in the corridors.
And there stood the librarian, a lady between years, not
young, not old; between colors, not dark, not pale; between heights,
not short, not tall, but rather frail, a woman you often heard talking
to herself off in the dark dust-stacks with a whisper like turned pages,
a woman who glided as if on hidden wheels.
She came carrying her soft lamp of face, lighting her way with her glance.
Her lips were moving, she was busy with words in the vast room behind her clouded gaze.
Charlie read her lips eagerly. He nodded. He waited for
her to halt and bring us to focus, which she did, suddenly. She gasped
and laughed at herself.
“Oh, Ralph, it’s you and—” A look of recognition warmed her face. “Why, you’re Ralph’s friend. Mr. Dickens, isn’t it?”
Charlie stared at her with a quiet and almost alarming devotion.
“Mr. Dickens,” I said. “I want you to meet—”
“‘Because I could not stop for Death—’” Charlie, eyes shut, quoted from memory.
The librarian blinked swiftly and her brow like a lamp turned high, took white color.
“Miss Emily,” he said.
“Her name is—” I said.
“Miss Emily.” He put out his hand to touch hers.
“Pleased,” she said. “But how did you—?”
“Know your name? Why, bless me, ma’am, I heard you scratching way off in there, runalong rush, only poets do that!”
“It’s nothing.”
“Head high, chin up,” he said, gently. “It’s something. ‘Because I could not stop for death’ is a fine A-1 first-class poem.”
“My own poems are so poor,” she said, nervously. “I copy hers out to learn.”
“Copy who?” I blurted.
“Excellent way to learn.”
“Is it, really?” She looked close at Charlie. “You’re not…?”
“Joking? No, not with Emily Dickinson, ma’am!”
“Emily Dickinson?” I said.
“That means much coming from you, Mr. Dickens,” she flushed. “I have read all your books.”
“All?” He backed off.
“All,” she added hastily, “that you have published so far, sir.”
“Just finished a new one.” I put in, “Sockdolager! A Tale of Two Cities.”
“And you, ma’am?” he asked, kindly.
She opened her small hands as if to let a bird go.
“Me? Why, I haven’t even sent a poem to our town newspaper.”
“You must!” he cried, with true passion and meaning. “Tomorrow. No, today!”
“But,” her voice faded. “I have no one to read them to, first.”
“Why,” said Chadie quietly. “You have Pip here, and,
accept my card, C. Dickens, Esquire. Who will, if allowed, stop by on
occasion, to see if all’s well in this Arcadian silo of books.”
She took his card. “I couldn’t—”
“Tut! You must. For I shall offer only warm sliced white
bread. Your words must be the marmalade and summer honey jam. I shall
read long and plain. You: short and rapturous of life and tempted by
that odd delicious Death you often lean upon. Enough.” He pointed.
“There. At the far end of the corridor, her lamp lit ready to guide your
hand … the Muse awaits. Keep and feed her well. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye?” she asked. “Doesn’t that mean ‘God be with you’?”
“So I have heard, dear lady, so I have heard.”
And suddenly we were back out in the sunlight, Mr. Dickens almost stumbling over his carpetbag waiting there.
In the middle of the lawn, Mr. Dickens stood very still and said, “The sky is blue, boy.”
“Yes, sir.”
“The grass is green.”
“Sure.” Then I stopped and really looked around. “I mean, heck, yeah!”
“And the wind … smell that sweet wind?”
We both smelled it. He said:
“And in this world are remarkable boys with vast imaginations who know the secrets of salvation…”
He patted my shoulder. Head down, I didn’t know what to do. And then I was saved by a whistle:
“Hey, the next train! Here it comes!”
We waited.
After a long while, Mr. Dickens said:
“There it goes…and let’s go home, boy.”
“Home!” I cried, joyfully, and then stopped. “But what about … Mr. Wyneski?”
“O, after all this, I have such confidence in you, Pip.
Every afternoon while I’m having tea and resting my wits, you must trot
down to the barbershop and—”
“Sweep hair!”
“Brave lad. It’s little enough. A loan of friendship from the Bank of England to the First National Bank of Green Town, Illinois. And now, Pip … pencil!”
I tried behind one ear, found gum; tried the other ear and found: “Pencil!”
“Paper?”
“Paper!”
We strode along under the soft green summer trees.
“Title, Pip—”
He reached up with his cane to write a mystery on the sky. I squinted at the invisible penmanship.
“The—”
He blocked out a second word on the air.
“Old,” I translated.
A third.
“C.U.” I spelled. “R.I….Curiosity!”
“How’s that for a title, Pip?”
I hesitated. “It … doesn’t seem, well, quite finished, sir.”
“What a Christian you are. There!”
He flourished a final word on the sun.
“S.H.O….Shop! The Old Curiosity Shop.”
“Take a novel, Pip!”
“Yes, sir,” I cried. “Chapter One!”
A blizzard of snow blew through the trees.
“What’s that?” I asked, and answered:
Why, summer gone. The calendar pages, all the hours and days, like in the movies, the way they just blow off over the hills. Charlie and I working together, finished, through. Many days at the library, over! Many nights reading aloud with Miss Emily done! Trains come and gone. Moons waxed and waned. New trains arriving and new lives teetering on the brink, and Miss Emily suddenly standing right there, and Charlie here with all their suitcases and handing me a paper sack.
“What’s this?”
“Rice. Pip, plain ordinary white rice, for the fertility
ritual. Throw it at us, boy. Drive us happily away. Hear those bells,
Pip? Here goes Mr. and Mrs. Charlie Dickens! Throw, boy, throw! Throw!”
I threw and ran, ran and threw, and them on the back
train platform waving out of sight and me yelling good-bye, Happy
marriage, Charlie! Happy times! Come back! Happy … Happy…
And by then I guess I was crying, and Dog chewing my
shoes, jealous, glad to have me alone again, and Mr. Wyneski waiting at
the barbershop to hand me my broom and make me his son once more.
And autumn came and lingered and at last a letter arrived from the married and traveling couple.
I kept the letter sealed all day and at dusk, while
Grandpa was raking leaves by the front porch I went out to sit and watch
and hold the letter and wait for him to look up and at last he did and I
opened the letter and read it out loud in the October twilight:
“Dear Pip,” I read, and had to stop for a moment seeing my old special name again, my eyes were so full.
“Dear Pip. We are in Aurora tonight and Felicity
tomorrow and Elgin the night after that. Charlie has six months of
lectures lined up and looking forward. Charlie and I are both working
steadily and are most happy…very happy … need I say?
“He calls me Emily.
“Pip, I don’t think you know who she was, but there was a
lady poet once, and I hope you’ll get her books out of the library
someday.
“Well, Charlie looks at me and says: ‘This is my Emily’ and I almost believe. No. I do believe.”
I stopped and swallowed hard and read on:
“We are crazy, Pip.
“People have said it. We know it. Yet we go on. But being crazy together is fine.
“It was being crazy alone I couldn’t stand any longer.
“Charlie sends his regards and wants you to know he has indeed started a fine new book, perhaps his best yet … one you suggested the title for, Bleak House.
“So we write and move, move and write, Pip. And some
year soon we may come back on the train which stops for water at your
town. And if you’re there and call our names as we know ourselves now,
we shall step off the train. But perhaps meanwhile you will get too old.
And if when the train stops, Pip, you’re not there, we shall
understand, and let the train move us on to another and another town.
“Signed, Emily Dickinson.
“P.S. Charlie says your grandfather is a dead ringer for Plato, but not to tell him.
“P.P.S. Charlie is my darling.”
“Charlie is my darling,” repeated Grandpa, sitting down and taking the letter to read it again. “Well, well…” he sighed. “Well, well…”
We sat there a long while, looking at the burning soft
October sky and the new stars. A mile off, a dog barked. Miles off, on
the horizon line, a train moved along, whistled, and tolled its bell,
once, twice, three times, gone.
“You know,” I said. “I don’t think they’re crazy.”
“Neither do I, Pip,” said Grandpa, lighting his pipe and blowing out the match. “Neither do I.”
The End
Fictional Story Related Index
This is an index of full text reprints of stories that I have
read that influenced me when I was young. They are rather difficult to
come by today, as where I live they are nearly impossible to find. Yes,
you can find them on the internet, behind paywalls. Ah, that’s why all
those software engineers in California make all that money. Well, here
they are FOR FREE. Enjoy reading them.
Movies that Inspired Me
Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
My Poetry
Art that Moves Me
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
This is a great short story from Ray Bradbury from his collection of short stories titled "R is for Rocket". This story is short, and nice, and is presented here in full text for easy reading. It concerns a man who was born with large green wings, who somehow lost his way in life, and how (with the help of his children) was reborn again.
Uncle Einar
“It will take only a minute,” said Uncle Einar’s sweet wife.
“I refuse,” he said. “And that takes but a second.”
“I’ve worked all morning,” she said, holding to her slender back, “and you won’t help? It’s drumming for a rain.”
“Let it rain,” he cried, morosely. “I’ll not be pierced by lightning just to air your clothes.”
“But you’re so quick at it.”
“Again, I refuse.” His vast tarpaulin wings hummed nervously behind his indignant back.
She gave him a slender rope on which were tied four dozen fresh-washed clothes. He turned it in his fingers with distaste. “So it’s come to this,” he muttered, bitterly. “To this, to this, to this.” He almost wept angry and acid tears.
“Don’t cry; you’ll wet them down again,” she said. “Jump up, now, run them about.”
“Run them about.” His voice was hollow, deep, and terribly wounded. “I say: let it thunder, let it pour!”
“If it was a nice, sunny day I wouldn’t ask,” she said, reasonably. “All my washing gone for nothing if you don’t. They’ll hang about the house — “
That did it. Above all, he hated clothes flagged and festooned so a man had to creep under on the way across a room. He jumped up. His vast green wings boomed. “Only so far as the pasture fence!”
Whirl: up he jumped, his wings chewed and loved the cool air. Before you’d say Uncle Einar Has Green Wings he sailed low across his farmland, trailing the clothes in a vast fluttering loop through the pounding concussion and backwash of his wings!
“Catch!”
Back from the trip, he sailed the clothes, dry as popcorn, down on a series of clean blankets she’d spread for their landing.
“Thank you!” she cried.
“Gahh!” he shouted, and flew off under the apple tree to brood.
Uncle Einar’s beautiful silk-like wings hung like sea-green sails behind him, and whirred and whispered from his shoulders when he sneezed or turned swiftly. He was one of the few in the Family whose talent was visible. All his dark cousins and nephews and brothers hid in small towns across the world, did unseen mental things or things with witch-fingers and white teeth, or blew down the sky like fire-leaves, or loped in forests like moon-silvered wolves. They lived comparatively safe from normal humans. Not so a man with great green wings.
Not that he hated his wings. Far from it! In his youth he’d always flown nights, because nights were rare times for winged men! Daylight held dangers, always had, always would; but nights, ah, nights, he had sailed over islands of cloud and seas of summer sky. With no danger to himself. It had been a rich, full soaring, an exhilaration.
But now he could not fly at night.
On his way home to some high mountain pass in Europe after a Homecoming among Family members in Mellin Town, Illinois (some years ago) he had drunk too much rich crimson wine. “I’ll be all right,” he had told himself, vaguely, as he beat his long way under the morning stars, over the moon-dreaming country hills beyond Mellin Town. And then — crack out of the sky —
A high-tension tower.
Like a netted duck! A great sizzle! His face blown black by a blue sparkler of wire, he fended off the electricity with a terrific back-jumping percussion of his wings, and fell.
His hitting the moonlit meadow under the tower made a noise like a large telephone book dropped from the sky.
Early the next morning, his dew-sodden wings shaking violently, he stood up. It was still dark.
There was a faint bandage of dawn stretched across the east. Soon the bandage would stain and all flight would be restricted. There was nothing to do but take refuge in the forest and wait out the day in the deepest thicket until another night gave his wings a hidden motion in the sky.
In this fashion he met his wife.
During the day, which was warm for November first in Illinois country, pretty young Brunilla Wexley was out to udder a lost cow, for she carried a silver pail in one hand as she sidled through thickets and pleaded cleverly to the unseen cow to please return home or burst her gut with unplucked milk. The fact that the cow would have most certainly come home when her teats really needed pulling did not concern Brunilla Wexley. It was a sweet excuse for forest-journeying, thistle-blowing, and flower chewing; all of which Brunilla was doing as she stumbled upon Uncle Einar.
Asleep near a bush, he seemed a man under a green shelter.
“Oh,” said Brunilla, with a fever. “A man. In a camp-tent.”
Uncle Einar awoke. The camp-tent spread like a large green fan behind him.
“Oh,” said Brunilla, the cow-searcher. “A man with wings.”
That was how she took it. She was startled, yes, but she had never been hurt in her life, so she wasn’t afraid of anyone, and it was a fancy thing to see a winged man and she was proud to meet him. She began to talk. In an hour they were old friends, and in two hours she’d quite forgotten his wings were there. And he somehow confessed how he happened to be in this wood.
“Yes, I noticed you looked banged around,” she said. “That right wing looks very bad. You’d best let me take you home and fix it. You won’t be able to fly all the way to Europe on it, anyway. And who wants to live in Europe these days?”
He thanked her, but he didn’t quite see how he could accept.
“But I live alone,” she said. “For, as you see, I’m quite ugly.”
He insisted she was not.
“How kind of you,” she said. “But I am, there’s no fooling myself. My folks are dead, I’ve a farm, a big one, all to myself, quite far from Mellin Town, and I’m in need of talking company.”
But wasn’t she afraid of him? he asked.
“Proud and jealous would be more near it,” she said. “May I?” And she stroked his large green membraned veils with careful envy. He shuddered at the touch and put his tongue between his teeth.
So there was nothing for it but that he come to her house for medicaments and ointments, and my! what a burn across his face, beneath his eyes! “Lucky you weren’t blinded,” she said. “How’d it happen?”
“Well. . .” he said, and they at her farm, hardly noticing they’d walked a mile, looking at each other.
A day passed, and another, and he thanked her at her door and said he must be going, he much appreciated the ointment, the care, the lodgings. It was twilight and between now, six o’clock, and five the next morning, he must cross an ocean and a continent. “Thank you; good-bye,” he said, and started to fly off in the dusk and crashed right into a maple tree.
“Oh!” she screamed, and ran to his unconscious body.
When he waked the next hour he knew he’d fly no more in the dark again ever; his delicate night-perception was gone. The winged telepathy that
had warned him where towers, trees, houses and hills stood across his path, the fine clear vision and sensibility that guided him through mazes of forest, cliff, and cloud, all were burnt forever by that strike across his face, that blue electric fry and sizzle.
“How?” he moaned softly. “How can I go to Europe? If I flew by day, I’d be seen and — miserable joke — maybe shot down! Or kept for a zoo perhaps, what a life that’d be! Brunilla, tell me, what shall I do?”
“Oh,” she whispered, looking at her hands. “We’ll think of something. . . .”
They were married.
The Family came for the wedding. In a great autumnal avalanche of maple, sycamore, oak, elm leaf they hissed and rustled, fell in a shower of horse chestnut, thumped like winter apples on the earth, with an overall scent of farewell-summer on the wind they made in their rushing. The ceremony? The ceremony was brief as a black candle lit, blown out, and smoke left still on the air. Its briefness, darkness, upside-down and backward quality escaped Brunilla, who only listened to the great tide of Uncle Einar’s wings faintly murmuring above them as they finished out the rite. And as for Uncle Einar, the wound across his nose was almost healed and, holding Brunilla’s arm, he felt Europe grow faint and melt away in the distance.
He didn’t have to see very well to fly straight up, or come straight down. It was only natural that on this night of their wedding he take Brunilla in his arms and fly right up into the sky.
A farmer, five miles over, glanced at a low cloud at midnight, saw faint glows and crackles.
“Heat lightning,” he observed, and went to bed.
They didn’t come down till morning, with the dew.
The marriage took. She had only to look at him, and it lifted her to think she was the only woman in the world married to a winged man. “Who else could say it?” she asked her mirror. And the answer was: “No one!”
He, on the other hand, found great beauty behind her face, great kindness and understanding. He made some changes in his diet to fit her thinking, and was careful with his wings about the house; knocked porcelains and broken lamps were nerve-scrapers, he stayed away from them. He changed his sleeping habits, since he couldn’t fly nights now anyhow. And she in turn fixed chairs so they were comfortable for his wings, put extra padding here or took it out there, and the things she said were the things he loved her for. “We’re in our cocoons, all of us. See how ugly I am?” she said. “But one day I’ll break out, spread wings as fine and handsome as you.”
“You broke out long ago,” he said.
She thought it over. “Yes,” she had to admit. “I know just which day it was, too. In the woods when I looked for a cow and found a tent!” They laughed, and with him holding her she felt so beautiful she knew their marriage had slipped her from her ugliness, like a bright sword from its case.
They had children. At first there was fear, all on his part, that they’d be winged.
“Nonsense, I’d love it!” she said, “Keep them out from under foot.”
“Then,” he exclaimed, “they’d be in your hair!”
“Ow!” she cried.
Four children were born, three boys and a girl, who, for their energy, seemed to have wings. They popped up like toadstools in a few years, and on hot summer days asked their father to sit under the apple tree and fan them with his cooling wings and tell them wild starlit tales of island clouds and ocean skies and textures of mist and wind and how a star tastes melting in your mouth, and how to drink cold mountain air, and how it feels to be a pebble dropped from Mt. Everest, turning to a green bloom, flowering your wings just before you strike bottom!
This was his marriage.
And today, six years later, here sat Uncle Einar, here he was, festering under the apple tree, grown impatient and unkind; not because this was his desire, but because after the long wait, he was still unable to fly the wild night sky; his extra sense had never returned. Here he sat despondently, nothing more than a summer sun-parasol, green and discarded, abandoned for the season by the reckless vacationers who once sought the refuge of its translucent shadow. Was he to sit here forever, afraid to fly by day because someone might see him? Was his only flight to be as a drier of clothes for his wife, or a fanner of children on hot August noons? His one occupation had always been flying Family errands, quicker than storms. A boomerang, he’d whickled over hills and valleys and like a thistle, landed. He had always had money; the Family had good use for their winged man! But now? Bitterness! His wings jittered and whisked the air and made a captive thunder.
“Papa,” said little Meg.
The children stood looking at his thought-dark face.
“Papa,” said Ronald. “Make more thunder!”
“It’s a cold March day, there’ll soon be rain and plenty of thunder,” said Uncle Einar.
“Will you come watch us?” asked Michael.
“Run on, run on! Let papa brood!”
He was shut of love, the children of love, and the love of children. He thought only of heavens, skies, horizons, infinities, by night or day, lit by star, moon, or sun, cloudy or clear, but always it was skies and heavens and horizons that ran ahead of you forever when you soared. Yet here he was, sculling the pasture, kept low for fear of being seen.
Misery in a deep well!
“Papa, come watch us; it’s March!” cried Meg. “And we’re going to the Hill with all the kids from town!”
Uncle Einar grunted. “What hill is that?”
“The Kite Hill, of course!” they all sang together.
Now he looked at them.
Each held a large paper kite, their faces sweating with anticipation and an animal glowing. In their small fingers were balls of white twine. From the kites, colored red and blue and yellow and green, hung caudal appendages of cotton and silk strips.
“We’ll fly our kites!” said Ronald. “Won’t you come?”
“No,” he said, sadly. “I mustn’t be seen by anyone or there’d be trouble.”
“You could hide and watch from the woods,” said Meg. “We made the kites ourselves. Just because we know how.”
“How do you know how?”
“You’re our father!” was the instant cry. “That’s why!”
He looked at his children for a long while. He sighed. “A kite festival, is it?”
“Yes, sir!”
“I’m going to win,” said Meg.
“No, I’m!” Michael contradicted.
“Me, me!” piped Stephan.
“Wind up the chimney!” roared Uncle Einar, leaping high with a deafening kettledrum of wings. “Children! Children, I love you dearly!”
“Father, what’s wrong?” said Michael, backing off.
“Nothing, nothing, nothing!” chanted Einar. He flexed his wings to their greatest propulsion and plundering. Whoom! they slammed like cymbals. The children fell flat in the backwash! “I have it, I have it! I’m free again! Fire in the flue! Feather on the wind! Brunilla!” Einar called to the house. His wife appeared. “I’m free!” he called, flushed and tall, on his toes. “Listen, Brunilla, I don’t need the night anymore! I can fly by day! I don’t need the night! I’ll fly every day and any day of the year from now on! — but I waste time, talking. Look!”
And as the worried members of his family watched, he seized the cotton tail from one of the little kites, tied it to his belt behind, grabbed the twine ball, held one end in his teeth, gave the other end to his children, and up, up into the air he flew, away into the March wind!
And across the meadows and over the farms his children ran, letting out string to the daylit sky, bubbling and stumbling, and Brunilla stood back in the farmyard and waved and laughed to see what was happening; and her children marched to the far Kite Hill and stood, the four of them, holding the ball of twine in their eager, proud fingers, each tugging and directing and pulling. And the children from Mellin Town came running with their small kites to let up on the wind, and they saw the great green kite leap and hover in the sky and exclaimed:
“Oh, oh, what a kite! What a kite! Oh, I wish I’d a kite like that! Where, where did you get it!”
“Our father made it!” cried Meg and Michael and Stephen and Ronald, and gave an exultant pull on the twine and the humming, thundering kite in the sky dipped and soared and made a great and magical exclamation mark across a cloud!
The End
Fictional Story Related Index
This is an index of full text reprints of stories that I have
read that influenced me when I was young. They are rather difficult to
come by today, as where I live they are nearly impossible to find. Yes,
you can find them on the internet, behind paywalls. Ah, that’s why all
those software engineers in California make all that money. Well, here
they are FOR FREE. Enjoy reading them.
Movies that Inspired Me
Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
My Poetry
Art that Moves Me
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
This is the full text of the story "R is for Rocket" by Ray Bradbury. It is not only a classic, but it is also a story that held particular meaning to me. For it was how I felt about my dreams to become that mystical "Spacemen". For us, back then, those of us who were "bitten by the bug" of space travel were fixated and driven by the one singular goal... to leave the Earth and explore "Outer Space".
I hope that you, the reader, will find this lovely story as wondrous as I have. Please enjoy it, and again, many thanks to the great master Ray Bradbury for composing this masterpiece.
R is for Rocket
There was this fence where we pressed our faces and felt the wind turn warm and held to the fence and forgot who we were or where we came from but dreamed of who we might be and where we might go. . . .
Yet we were boys and liked being boys and lived in a Florida town and liked the town and went to school and fairly liked the school and climbed trees and played football and liked our mothers and fathers. . . .
But some time every hour of every day of every week for a minute or a second when we thought on fire and stars and the fence beyond which they waited . . . we liked the rockets more.
The fence. The rockets.
Every Saturday morning . . .
The guys met at my house.
With the sun hardly up, they yelled until the neighbors were moved to brandish paralysis guns out their ventilators I commanding the guys to shut up or they’d be frozen statues for the next hour and then where would they be?
Aw, climb a rocket, stick your head in the main-jet! the kids always yelled back, but yelled this safe behind our garden I fence. Old Man Wickard, next door, is a great shot with the para-gun.
This one dim cool Saturday morning I was lying in bed thinking about how I had flunked my semantics exam the day before at formula-school, when I heard the gang yelling below. It was hardly 7 a.m. and there was still a lot of fog roaming in off the Atlantic, and only now were the weather-control vibrators at each corner starting to hum and shoot out rays to get rid of the stuff; I heard them moaning soft and nice.
I padded to the window and stuck my head out.
“Okay, space-pirates! Motors off!”
“Hey!” shouted Ralph Priory. “We just heard, there’s a new schedule today! The Moon Job, the one with the new XL3 motor, is cutting gravity in an hour!”
“Buddha, Muhammad, Allah, and other real and semi-mythological figures,” I said, and went away from the window so fast the concussion laid all the boys out on my lawn.
I zippered myself into a jumper, yanked on my boots, clipped my food-capsules to my hip-pocket, for I knew there’d be no food or even thought of food today, we’d just stuff with pills when our stomachs barked, and fell down the two-story vacuum elevator.
On the lawn, all five of the guys were chewing their lips, bouncing around, scowling.
“Last one,” said I, passing them at 5000 mph, “to the monorail is a bug-eyed Martian!”
On the monorail, with the cylinder hissing us along to Rocket Port, twenty miles from town — a few minutes ride — I had bugs in my stomach. A guy fifteen doesn’t get to see the big stuff often enough, mostly every week it was the small continental cargo rockets coming and going on schedule. But this was big, among the biggest . . . the Moon and beyond. . . .
“I’m sick,” said Priory, and hit me on the arm.
I hit him back. “Me, too. Boy, ain’t Saturday the best day in the week!?”
Priory and I traded wide, understanding grins. We got along all Condition Go. The other pirates were okay. Sid Rossen, Mac Leslyn, Earl Marnee, they knew how to jump around like all the kids, and they loved the rockets, too, but I had the feeling they wouldn’t be doing what Ralph and I would do some day. Ralph and I wanted the stars for each of us, more than we would want a fistful of clear-cut blue-white diamonds.
We yelled with the yellers, we laughed with the laughers, but at the middle of it all, we were still, Ralph and I, and the cylinder whispered to a stop and we were outside yelling, laughing, running, but quiet and almost in slow motion, Ralph ahead of me, and all of us pointed one way, at the observation fence and grabbing hold, yelling for the slowpokes to catch up, but not looking back for them, and then we were all there together and the big rocket came out of its plastic work canopy like a great interstellar circus tent and moved along its gleaming track out toward the fire point, accompanied by the gigantic gantry like a gathering of prehistoric reptile birds which kept and preened and fed this one big fire monster and led it toward its seizure and birth into a suddenly blast-furnace sky.
I quit breathing. I didn’t even suck another breath it seemed until the rocket was way out on the concrete meadow, followed by water-beetle tractors and great cylinders bearing hidden men, and all around, in asbestos suits, praying-mantis mechanics fiddled with machines and buzzed and cawwed and gibbered to each other on invisible, unhearable radiophones, but we could hear it all, in our heads, our minds, our hearts.
“Lord,” I said at last.
“The very good Lord,” said Ralph Priory at my elbow.
The others said this, too, over and over.
It was something to “good Lord” about. It was a hundred years of dreaming all sorted out and chosen and put together Ito make the hardest, prettiest, swiftest dream of all. Every line was fire solidified and made perfect, it was flame frozen, and lice waiting to thaw there in the middle of a concrete prairie, ready to wake with a roar, jump high and knock its silly fine great head against the Milky Way and knock the stars down in a full return of firefall meteors. You felt it could kick the Coal Sack Nebula square in the midriff and make it stand out of the way.
It got me in the midriff, too — it gripped me in such a way I knew the special sickness of longing and envy and grief for lack of accomplishment. And when the astronauts patrolled the field in the final silent mobile-van, my body went with them in their strange white armor, in their bubble-helmets and insouciant pride, looking as if they were team-parading to a magnetic football game at one of the local mag-fields, for mere practice. But they were going to the Moon, they went every month now, and the crowds that used to come to watch were no longer there, there was just us kids to worry them up and worry them off.
“Gosh,” I said. “What wouldn’t I give to go with them. What wouldn’t I give.”
“Me,” said Mac, “I’d give my one-year monorail privileges.”
“Yeah. Oh, very much yeah.”
It was a big feeling for us kids caught half between this morning’s toys and this afternoon’s very real and powerful fireworks.
And then the preliminaries got over with. The fuel was in the rocket and the men ran away from it on the ground like ants running lickety from a metal god — and the Dream woke up and gave a yell and jumped into the sky. And then it was gone, all the vacuum shouting of it, leaving nothing but a hot trembling in the air, through the ground, and up our legs to our hearts. Where it had been was a blazed, seared pock and a fog of rocket smoke like a cumulus cloud banked low.
“It’s gone!” yelled Priory.
And we all began to breathe fast again, frozen there on the ground as if stunned by the passing of a gigantic paralysis gun.
“I want to grow up quick,” I said, then. “I want to grow up quick so I can take that rocket.”
I bit my lips. I was so darned young, and you cannot apply for space work. You have to be chosen. Chosen.
Finally somebody, I guess it was Sidney, said:
“Let’s go to the tele-show now.”
Everyone said yeah, except Priory and myself. We said no, and the other kids went off laughing breathlessly, talking, and left Priory and me there to look at the spot where the ship had been.
It spoiled everything else for us — that takeoff.
Because of it, I flunked my semantics test on Monday.
I didn’t care.
At times like that I thanked Providence for concentrates. When your stomach is nothing but a coiled mass of excitement, you hardly feel like drawing a chair to a full hot dinner. A few concen-tabs swallowed, did wonderfully well as substitution, without the urge of appetite.
I got to thinking about it, tough and hard, all day long and late at night. It got so bad I had to use sleep-massage mechs every night, coupled with some of Tschaikovsky’s quieter music to get my eyes shut.
“Good Lord, young man,” said my teacher, that Monday at class. “If this keeps up I’ll have you reclassified at the next psych-board meeting.”
“I’m sorry,” I replied.
He looked hard at me. “What sort of block have you got? I It must be a very simple, and also a conscious, one.”
I winced. “It’s conscious, sir; but it’s not simple. It’s multi-tentacular. In brief, though — it’s rockets.”
He smiled. “R is for Rocket, eh?”
“I guess that’s it, sir.”
“We can’t let it interfere with your scholastic record, though, young man.”
“Do you think I need hypnotic suggestion, sir?”
“No, no.” He flipped through a small tab of records with my name blocked on it. I had a funny stone in my stomach, just lying there. He looked at me. “You know, Christopher, you’re king-of-the-hill here; head of the class.” He closed his eyes and mused over it. “We’ll have to see about a lot of other things,” he concluded. Then he patted me on the shoulder.
“Well — get on with your work. Nothing to worry about.”
He walked away.
I tried to get back to work, but I couldn’t. During the rest of the day the teacher kept watching me and looking at my tab-record and chewing his lip. About two in the afternoon he dialed a number on his desk-audio and discussed something with somebody for about five minutes.
I couldn’t hear what was said.
But when he set the audio into its cradle, he stared straight at me with the funniest light in his eyes.
It was envy and admiration and pity all in one. It was a little sad and it was much of happiness. It had a lot in it, just in his eyes. The rest of his face said nothing.
It made me feel like a saint and a devil sitting there.
Ralph Priory and I slid home from formula-school together early that afternoon. I told Ralph what had happened and he frowned in the dark way he always frowns.
I began to worry. And between the two of us we doubled and tripled the worry.
“You don’t think you’ll be sent away, do you, Chris?”
Our monorail car hissed. We stopped at our station. We got out. We walked slow. “I don’t know,” I said.
“That would be plain dirty,” said Ralph.
“Maybe I need a good psychiatric laundering, Ralph. I can’t go on flubbing my studies this way.”
We stopped outside my house and looked at the sky for a long moment. Ralph said something funny.
“The stars aren’t out in the daytime, but we can see ’em, can’t we, Chris?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Darn rights.”
“Well stick it together, huh, Chris? Blast them, they can’t take you away now. We’re pals. It wouldn’t be fair.”
I didn’t say anything because there was no room in my throat for anything but a hectagonal lump.
“What’s the matter with your eyes?” asked Priory.
“Aw, I looked at the sun too long. Come on inside, Ralph.”
We yelled under the shower spray in the bath-cubicle, but our yells weren’t especially convincing, even when we turned on the ice-water.
While we were standing in the warm-air dryer, I did a lot of thinking. Literature, I figured, was full of people who fought battles against hard, razor-edged opponents. They pitted brain and muscle against obstacles until they won out or were themselves defeated. But here I was with hardly a sign of any outward conflict. It was all running around in spiked boots inside my head, making cuts and bruises where no one could see them except me and a psychologist. But it was just as bad.
“Ralph,” I said, as we dressed, “I got a war on.”
“All by yourself?” he asked.
“I can’t include you,” I said. “Because this is personal. How many times has my mother said, ‘Don’t eat so much, Chris, your eyes are bigger than your stomach?'”
“A million times.”
“Two million. Well, paraphrase it, Ralph. Change it to ‘Don’t see so much, Chris, your mind is too big for your body.’ I got a war on between a mind that wants things my body can’t give it.”
Priory nodded quietly. “I see what you mean about its being a personal war. In that case, Christopher, I’m at war, too.”
“I knew you were,” I said. “Somehow I think the other kids’ll grow out of it. But I don’t think we will, Ralph. I think we’ll keep waiting.”
We sat down in the middle of the sunlit upper deck of the house, and started checking over some homework on our formula-pads. Priory couldn’t get his. Neither could I. Priory put into words the very thing I didn’t dare say out loud.
“Chris, the Astronaut Board selects. You can’t apply for it. You wait.”
“I know.”
“You wait from the time you’re old enough to turn cold in the stomach when you see a Moon rocket, until all the years go by, and every month that passes you hope that one morning a blue Astronaut helicopter will come down out of the sky, land on your lawn, and that a neat-looking engineer will ease out, walk up the rampway briskly, and touch the bell.
“You keep waiting for that helicopter until you’re twenty-one. And then, on the last day of your twentieth year you drink and laugh a lot and say what the heck, you didn’t really care about it, anyway.”
We both just sat there, deep in the middle of his words. We both just sat there. Then:
“I don’t want that disappointment, Chris. I’m fifteen, just like you. But if I reach my twenty-first year without an Astronaut ringing the bell where I live at the ortho-station, I — “
“I know,” I said. “I know. I’ve talked to men who’ve waited, all for nothing. And if it happens that way to us, Ralph, well — we’ll get good and drunk together and then go out and take jobs loading cargo on a Europe-bound freighter.”
Ralph stiffened and his face went pale. “Loading cargo.”
There was a soft, quick step on the ramp and my mother was there. I smiled. “Hi, lady!”
“Hello. Hello, Ralph.”
“Hello, Jhene.”
She didn’t look much older than twenty-five, in spite of having birthed and raised me and worked at the Government Statistics House. She was light and graceful and smiled a lot, and I could see how father must have loved her very much when he was alive. One parent is better than none. Poor Priory, now, raised in one of those orthopedical stations. . . .
Jhene walked over and put her hand on Ralph’s face. “You look ill,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
Ralph managed a fairly good smile. “Nothing — at all.”
Jhene didn’t need prompting. She said, “You can stay here I tonight, Priory. We want you. Don’t we, Chris?”
“Heck, yes.”
“I should get back to the station,” said Ralph, rather feebly, I observed. “But since you asked and Chris here needs help on his semantics for tomorrow, I’ll stick and help him.”
“Very generous,” I observed.
“First, though, I’ve a few errands. I’ll take the ‘rail and be back in an hour, people.”
When Ralph was gone my mother looked at me intently, then brushed my hair back with a nice little move of her fingers.
“Something’s happening, Chris.”
My heart stopped talking because it didn’t want to talk any more for a while. It waited.
I opened my mouth, but Jhene went on:
“Something’s up somewhere. I had two calls at work today. One from your teacher. One from — I can’t say. I don’t want to say until things happen — “
My heart started talking again, slow and warm.
“Don’t tell me, then, Jhene. Those calls — “
She just looked at me. She took my hand between her two soft warm ones. “You’re so young, Chris. You’re so awfully young.”
I didn’t speak.
Her eyes brightened. “You never knew your father. I wish you had. You know what he was, Chris?”
I said, “Yeah. He worked in a Chemistry Lab, deep underground most of the time.”
And, my mother added, strangely, “He worked deep under the ground, Chris, and never saw the stars.”
My heart yelled in my chest. Yelled loud and hard.
“Oh, Mother. Mother — “
It was the first time in years I had called her mother.
When I woke the next morning there was a lot of sunlight in the room, but the cushion where Priory slept when he stayed over, was vacant. I listened. I didn’t hear him splashing in the shower-cube, and the dryer wasn’t humming. He was gone.
I found his note pinned on the sliding door.
“See you at formula at noon. Your mother wanted me to do some work for her. She got a call this morning, and said she needed me to help. So long. Priory.”
Priory out running errands for Jhene. Strange. A call in the early morning to Jhene. I went back and sat down on the cushion.
While I was sitting there a bunch of the kids yelled down on the lawn-court. “Hey, Chris! You’re late!”
I stuck my head out the window. “Be right down!”
“No, Chris.”
My mother’s voice. It was quiet and it had something funny in it. I turned around. She was standing in the doorway behind me, her face pale, drawn, full of some small pain. “No, Chris,” she said again, softly. “Tell them to go on to formula without you — today.”
The kids were still making noise downstairs, I guess, but I didn’t hear them. I just felt myself and my mother, slim and pale and restrained in my room. Far off, the weather-control vibrators started to hum and throb.
I turned slowly and looked down at the kids. The three of them were looking up, lips parted casually, half-smiling, semantic-tabs in their knotty fingers. “Hey — ” one of them said. Sidney, it was.
“Sorry, Sid. Sorry, gang. Go on without me. I can’t go to formula today. See you later, huh?”
“Aw, Chris!”
“Sick?”
“No. Just — Just go on without me, gang. I’ll see you.”
I felt numb. I turned away from their upturned, questioning faces and glanced at the door. Mother wasn’t there. She had gone downstairs, quietly. I heard the kids moving off, not quite as boisterously, toward the monorail station.
Instead of using the vac-elevator, I walked slowly downstairs. “Jhene,” I said, “where’s Ralph?”
Jhene pretended to be interested in combing her long light hair with a vibro-toothed comb. “I sent him off. I didn’t want him here this morning.”
“Why am I staying home from formula, Jhene?”
“Chris, please don’t ask.”
Before I could say anything else, there was a sound in the air. It cut through the very soundproofed wall of the house, and hummed in my marrow, quick and high as an arrow of glittering music.
I swallowed. All the fear and uncertainty and doubt went away, instantly.
When I heard that note, I thought of Ralph Priory. Oh Ralph, if you could be here now. I couldn’t believe the truth of it. Hearing that note and hearing it with my whole body and soul as well as with my ears.
It came closer, that sound. I was afraid it would go away. But it didn’t go away. It lowered its pitch and came down outside the house in great whirling petals of light and shadow and I knew it was a helicopter the color of the sky. It stopped humming, and in the silence my mother tensed forward, dropped the vibro-comb and took in her breath.
In that silence, too, I heard booted footsteps walking up the ramp below. Footsteps that I had waited for a long time.
Footsteps I was afraid would never come.
Somebody touched the bell.
And I knew who it was.
And all I could think was, Ralph, why in heck did you have to go away now, when all this is happening? Blast it, Ralph, why did you?
The man looked as if he had been born in his uniform. It fitted like a second layer of salt-colored skin, touched here and there with a line, a dot of blue. As simple and perfect a uniform as could be made, but with all the muscled power of the universe behind it.
His name was Trent. He spoke firmly, with a natural round perfection, directly to the subject.
I stood there, and my mother was on the far side of the room, looking like a bewildered little girl. I stood listening.
Out of all the talking I remember some of the snatches:
“. . . highest grades, high IQ. Perception A-1, curiosity Triple-A. Enthusiasm necessary to the long, eight-year educational grind. . . .”
“Yes, sir.”
“. . . talks with your semantics and psychology teachers — “
“Yes, sir.”
“. . . and don’t forget, Mr. Christopher . . .”
Mister Christopher!
“. . . and don’t forget, Mr. Christopher, nobody is to know you have been selected by the Astronaut Board.”
“No one?”
“Your mother and teacher know, naturally. But no other person must know. Is that perfectly understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
Trent smiled quietly, standing there with his big hands at his sides. “You want to ask why, don’t you? Why you can’t tell your friends? I’ll explain.
“It’s a form of psychological protection. We select about ten thousand young men each year from the earth’s billions. Out of that number three thousand wind up, eight years later, as spacemen of one sort or another. The others must return to society. They’ve flunked out, but there’s no reason for everyone to know. They usually flunk out, if they’re going to flunk, in the first six months. And it’s tough to go back and face your friends and say you couldn’t make the grade at the biggest job in the world. So we make it easy to go back.
“But there’s still another reason. It’s psychological, too. Half the fun of being a kid is being able to lord it over the other guys, by being superior in some way. We take half the fun out of Astronaut selection by strictly forbidding you to tell your pals. Then, we’ll know if you wanted to go into space for frivolous reasons, or for space itself. If you’re in it for personal conceit — you’re damned.
If you’re in it because you can’t help being in it and have to be in it — you’re blessed.”
He nodded to my mother. “Thank you, Mrs. Christopher.”
“Sir,” I said. “A question. I have a friend. Ralph Priory. He lives at an ortho-station — “
Trent nodded. “I can’t tell you his rating, of course, but he’s on our list. He’s your buddy? You want him along, of course. I’ll check his record. Station-bred, you say? That’s not good. But — we’ll see.”
“If you would, please, thanks.”
“Report to me at the Rocket Station Saturday afternoon at five, Mr. Christopher. Meantime: silence.”
He saluted. He walked off. He went away in the helicopter into the sky, and Mother was beside me quickly, saying, “Oh, Chris, Chris,” over and over, and we held to each other and whispered and talked and she said many things, how good this was going to be for us, but especially for me, how fine, what an honor it was, like the old old days when men fasted and took vows and joined churches and stopped up their tongues and were silent and prayed to be worthy and to live well as monks and priests of many churches in far places, and came forth and moved in the world and lived as examples and taught well. It was no different now, this was a greater priesthood, in a way, she said, she inferred, she knew, and I was to be some small part of it, I would not be hers any more, I would belong to all the worlds, I would be all the things my father wanted to be and never lived or had a chance to be. . . .
“Darn rights, darn rights,” I murmured. “I will, I promise I will . . .”
I caught my voice. “Jhene — how — how will we tell Ralph? What about him?”
“You’re going away, that’s all, Chris. Tell him that. Very simply. Tell him no more. He’ll understand.”
“But, Jhene, you —”
She smiled softly. “Yes, I’ll be lonely, Chris. But I’ll have my work and I’ll have Ralph.”
“You mean . . .”
“I’m taking him from the ortho-station. He’ll live here, when you’re gone. That’s what you wanted me to say, isn’t it, Chris?”
I nodded, all paralyzed and strange inside.
“That’s exactly what I wanted you to say.”
“He’ll be a good son, Chris. Almost as good as you.”
“He’ll be fine!”
We told Ralph Priory. How I was going away maybe to school in Europe for a year and how Mother wanted him to come live as her son, now, until such time as I came back. We said it quick and fast, as if it burned our tongues. And when we finished, Ralph came and shook my hand and kissed my mother on the cheek and he said:
“I’ll be proud. I’ll be very proud.”
It was funny, but Ralph didn’t even ask any more about why I was going, or where, or how long I would be away. All he would say was, “We had a lot of fun, didn’t we?” and let it go at that, as if he didn’t dare say any more.
It was Friday night, after a concert at the amphitheater in the center of our public circle, and Priory and Jhene and I came home, laughing, ready to go to bed.
I hadn’t packed anything. Priory noted this briefly, and let it go. All of my personal supplies for the next eight years would be supplied by someone else. No need for packing.
My semantics teacher called on the audio, smiling and saying a very brief, pleasant good-bye.
Then, we went to bed, and I kept thinking in the hour before I lolled off, about how this was the last night with Jhene and Ralph. The very last night.
Only a kid of fifteen — me.
And then, in the darkness, just before I went to sleep, Priory twisted softly on his cushion, turned his solemn face to me, and whispered, “Chris?” A pause. “Chris. You still awake?” It was like a faint echo.
“Yes,” I said.
“Thinking?”
A pause.
“Yes.”
He said, “You’re — You’re not waiting any more, are you, Chris?”
I knew what he meant. I couldn’t answer.
I said, “I’m awfully tired, Ralph.”
He twisted back and settled down and said, “That’s what I thought. You’re not waiting any more. Gosh, but that’s good, Chris. That’s good.”
He reached out and punched me in the arm-muscle, lightly.
Then we both went to sleep.
It was Saturday morning. The kids were yelling outside. Their voices filled the seven o’clock fog. I heard Old Man Wickard’s ventilator flip open and the zip of his para-gun, playfully touching around the kids.
“Shut up!” I heard him cry, but he didn’t sound grouchy. It was a regular Saturday game with him. And I heard the kids giggle.
Priory woke up and said, “Shall I tell them, Chris, you’re not going with them today?”
“Tell them nothing of the sort.” Jhene moved from the door. She bent out the window, her hair all light against a ribbon of fog. “Hi, gang! Ralph and Chris will be right down. Hold gravity!”
“Jhene!” I cried.
She came over to both of us. “You’re going to spend your Saturday the way you always spend it — with the gang!”
“I planned on sticking with you, Jhene.”
“What sort of holiday would that be, now?”
She ran us through our breakfast, kissed us on the cheeks, and forced us out the door into the gang’s arms.
“Let’s not go out to the Rocket Port today, guys.”
“Aw, Chris — why not?”
Their faces did a lot of changes. This was the first time in history I hadn’t wanted to go. “You’re kidding, Chris.”
“Sure he is.”
“No, he’s not. He means it,” said Priory. “And I don’t want to go either. We go every Saturday. It gets tiresome. We can go next week instead.”
“Aw . . .”
They didn’t like it, but they didn’t go off by themselves. It was no fun, they said, without us.
“What the heck— we’ll go next week.”
“Sure we will. What do you want to do, Chris?”
I told them.
We spent the morning playing Kick the Can and some games we’d given up a long time ago, and we hiked out along some old rusty and abandoned railroad tracks and walked in a small woods outside town and photographed some birds and went swimming raw, and all the time I kept thinking — this is the last day.
We did everything we had ever done before on Saturday. All the silly crazy things, and nobody knew I was going away except Ralph, and five o’clock kept getting nearer and nearer.
At four, I said good-bye to the kids.
“Leaving so soon, Chris? What about tonight?”
“Call for me at eight,” I said. “We’ll go see the new Sally Gibberts picturel”
“Swell.”
“Cut gravity!”
And Ralph and I went home.
Mother wasn’t there, but she had left part of herself, her smile and her voice and her words on a spool of audio-film on my bed. I inserted it in the viewer and threw the picture on the wall. Soft yellow hair, her white face and her quiet words:
“I hate good-byes, Chris. I’ve gone to the laboratory to do some extra work. Good luck. All of my love. When I see you again — you’ll be a man.”
That was all.
Priory waited outside while I saw it over four times. “I hate good-byes, Chris. I’ve gone . . . work. . . . luck. All . . . my love. . . .”
I had made a film-spool myself the night before. I spotted it in the viewer and left it there. It only said good-bye.
Priory walked halfway with me. I wouldn’t let him get on the Rocket Port monorail with me. I
just shook his hand, tight, and said, “It was fun today, Ralph.”
“Yeah. Well, see you next Saturday, huh, Chris?”
“I wish I could say yes.”
“Say yes anyway. Next Saturday — the woods, the gang, the rockets, and Old Man Wickard and his trusty para-gun.”
We laughed. “Sure. Next Saturday, early. Take — Take care of our mother, will you, Priory?”
“That’s a silly question, you nut,” he said.
“It is, isn’t it?”
He swallowed. “Chris.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll be waiting. Just like you waited and don’t have to wait any more. I’ll wait.”
“Maybe it won’t be long, Priory. I hope not.”
I jabbed him, once, in the arm. He jabbed back.
The monorail door sealed. The car hurled itself away, and Priory was left behind.
I stepped out at the Port. It was a five-hundred-yard walk down to the Administration building. It took me ten years to walk it.
“Next time I see you you’ll be a man — “
“Don’t tell anybody — “
“I’ll wait, Chris — “
It was all choked in my heart and it wouldn’t go away and it swam around in my eyes.
I thought about my dreams. The Moon Rocket. It won’t be part of me, part of my dream any longer. I’ll be part of it.
I felt small there, walking, walking, walking.
The afternoon rocket to London was just taking off as I went down the ramp to the office. It shivered the ground and it shivered and thrilled my heart.
I was beginning to grow up awfully fast.
I stood watching the rocket until someone snapped their heels, cracked me a quick salute.
I was numb.
“C. M. Christopher?”
“Yes, sir. Reporting, sir.”
“This way, Christopher. Through that gate.”
Through that gate and beyond the fence . . .
This fence where we had pressed our faces and felt the wind turn warm and held to the fence and forgot who we were or where we came from but dreamed of who we might be and where we might go . . .
This fence where had stood the boys who liked being boys who lived in a town and liked the town
and fairly liked school and liked football and liked their fathers and mothers . . .
The boys who some time every hour of every day of every week thought on fire and stars and the fence beyond which they waited. . . . The boys who liked the rockets more.
Mother, Ralph, I’ll see you. I’ll be back.
Mother!
Ralph!
And, walking, I went beyond the fence.
The End
What an absolutely wonderful story.
It means a lot to me.
And people, that's exactly how it was like for me to leave university as an Aerospace Engineer and enter NAS, NASC Pensacola Florida as an AOCS Aviation Office Candidate.
I well remember arrival at the airport and proceeding to the lobby where there was this enormously huge arrow pointing to this ridiculously tiny phone set in the wall. Telling me to pick up the phone and call the base.
Fictional Story Related Index
This is an index of full text reprints of stories that I have
read that influenced me when I was young. They are rather difficult to
come by today, as where I live they are nearly impossible to find. Yes,
you can find them on the internet, behind paywalls. Ah, that’s why all
those software engineers in California make all that money. Well, here
they are FOR FREE. Enjoy reading them.
Movies that Inspired Me
Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
My Poetry
Art that Moves Me
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
This is a little poem that I composed years back. As I recall, I was waiting at an airport for a connecting flight on the way home from a very long and difficult trip. I just started writing and this poem popped out. Enjoy.
My Kitten Knows
My kitten knows.
Quiet She, but can see...
Things inside.
Things I must hide...
From others who dare not know the truth about me.
Feelings inside that stay.
And feelings inside that say...
How I care about you.
And all you do...
For sometime when we can play.
How it will happen I dare not say.
No one knows my secret raw...
How I broke the sacred law...
And fell in love...
With one so pretty.
No one knows...
Except my kitty.
For here I am.
Alone.
In the dark.
Thinking of you and the mark...
... you made on my heart.
Dear. Let's not stay apart...
...too much longer.
And when you see a kitten near...
Please, please remember me dear...
For feelings we so boldly hold...
Are shared with cats that know them cold.
As I recall, I read this poem at a poetry recital in Boston sometime in the late 1990’s. The beatnick wanna-bes and the cute girls in the sheepherder clothing all did seem to dig it. As did the lesbian couples, and the lone chain-smoking bongo-drum player.
I wrote up a ton load of poems. All lost amongst the debris of time. This is the only one that I remember, and the only one that I wish to share at this moment in time. If there is one things that I would like to be remembered for, it would be for my love of wine, my love of friends and companions, and my passion for poetry.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.
Articles & Links
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
This is a very detailed discussion on how a Business KTV works in
China. This is a pretty large multi-part post. It was originally posted
HERE,
but it soon became problematic as the videos would not load and the SEO
flags weren’t being picked up by the search engines. So I broke it down
into smaller bite-sized posts. It’s faster to load, easier to read, and
you can see all the videos without problem. Enjoy.
This is part 9B of 17.
Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.
NSFW Parties
What are we? Children? All the term “NSFW” is designed “to protect the children”, yet at most of these venues there isn’t anyone under the age of 25. So, it’s all kind of silly trying to maintain NSFW standards designed to protect pre-adolescent children.
In America everything is so PC. There is even a term for hiding behavior in such a way that you might not lose your job. NSFW means Not Safe For Work. Heck, only in America or some selected European Socialist "Paradises" perhaps. Not in China.
So everybody is well fed, well drunk and you’ve had your fill of beer, karaoke, weird Chinese snacks and “hands on” strip shows – now what? It’s up to you… usually.
Sometimes, depending on the arrangement with the girls manager, the parties can get really fun, as these two videos can attest…
The girls will typically have a good time. I know that I certainly do.
Their enjoyment is directed by their manager, who works out what ever arrangement that is proper with the host boss. They will be edged on by the other girls who might inspire playful acts of a sexual nature and other curious events.
The basic idea is to get drunk. Lower your inhibitions and have a good time.
As these videos attest, being with a cute gal (both of you) getting drunk and playing around is a great reward for an ambitious boss.
The
KTV is a refuge. It is a controlled environment where a person can
become someone else and behave differently. In China, everyone wears a
mask. This is a face (mingzi) that defines their role and how they
conduct their business. For many bosses they only have two roles; Boss
and Family head. Each time, they must exist within that role.
They come home and the wife and the children expect the father to be a
traditional father. He will play with the children. He will help them
learn. He will support the wife and take care of things that she needs
help with. He will do this within the role and the face that he must
wear.
Then, he goes to work. He puts on the Boss face. Here there is
actions and behaviors that he is culturally restrained to follow. He
must maintain that appearance. He must always be calm and collected and
stern and in control.
The problem is…
There is never an opportunity for him to let loose and be himself.
Never. Never, that is until he goes to a KTV. There, once he is inside
the doors, he is in a world where he can be himself. It is a protected
world. The doors are closed and sealed. Guards protect the people
inside. Female entertainment is provided, and if the KTV is half decent,
the girls are vetted to make sure they do not prey on the clients.
He eats, drinks and is merry. Then he can go upstairs to the hotel
room and have a nice long happy ending with the girl that he had
selected. Else, she might ride home with him to a different hotel. All
of which is under the helpful and watchful eyes of his aides, the girls
and KTV managers, and the security guards that are stationed for
protection.
The KTV is a place for fun.
Now who doesn’t like to smoke, drink, sing and dance with pretty
girls? It’s a rare person indeed. When I grew up we used to have keg
parties in the woods and we always would sing, and carry on. We always
loved it when the girls would play with us and have fun. This is
universal.
There are all kinds of fun activities that take place. They vary from
singing and dancing to smoking cigars, and playing poker. One of the
most common things to do is play “rock, paper and scissors”. This is an
ancient Chinese drinking game. I guess that it was ported to the United
States during the great migration of Chinese right after the American
Civil War.
Here’s some chicks playing during dinner…
If you want to return to the start of this series, please go HERE.
Here is the advice that I would give myself when I turned 25 years of age. It is the advice I would give my younger self after attending the school of “hard knocks” for around four decades or so. Back then, I had just got married to my first wife. The world was wide open to me. I was poor, but very hopeful. As were both of us.
Now, in my 60’s, I look back at my life. I look at the mistakes that I made, I look at the assumptions that I had, and I see how they affected the life that lived. If I had a time machine, and go back four or so decades, what would I tell myself?
What would I tell myself to do differently in the early years of the Ronald Reagan administration? What would I advise myself to do, and not to do?
Would I tell myself “buy as much Microsoft, McDonalds stock as you possibly can”? Or, would I advise something different? Would I concentrate on obtaining huge sums of money or would I concentrate on happiness?
Truthfully. I think that I would advise happiness over money.
Ah… Back then…
Well, like most people of the “boomer” generation, we were taught that if you applied yourself that you would get a “great job”, and the company would take care of you for the rest of your life. We believed then, laughingly so, that we would get a pension. And, that our retirement years would be fully funded by both the social security system and the pensions from our employer(s).
What a laugh!
Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.
Here is the Career Advice that I would give my 25 year old self. And, for starters, the very first and most important lesson that I would give would be this…
[1] Be your own boss. Working for someone else sucks.
All my life, at home, at school, in the boy-scouts, and at the jobs that I worked, I was constantly told that I must “work hard”, so that I can reap the rewards of being a loyal employee. I could get all the “perks” of management. I could get bonuses, extra vacation time. I could get a generous pension, and the pride that is instilled by being a “loyal” worker.
Nonsense. Not one employer valued my labors appropriately. Not one.
Hey! That E-ETRESS device in every single General Motors vehicle, you know the one… this disables the car by remote control via satellite. Yeah, well I was the fella what designed it. I was the project manager and that little baby was mine.
This little puppy was easily worth millions to GM, and I am sure helped them get millions of dollars in military and government contracts as well. Don’t tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about. I was also involved in contract negotiations regarding it.
Hey! What did I get?
What did I get for all the long nights, and working “unpaid overtime”? What did I get for my innovations, my organization, my contribution? What did the company reward me with?
I got a ball-point pen that said “Success is a way of life”.
Once the program was finished, I was let go.
This is what many companies do with their high-end technical experts. They "pull a NASA". (Referring to the mass layoff of about 90% of the "Rocket Scientists" by Tricky Dickie when he killed the Apollo Moon Exploration Program in the early 1970's.)
It happened on a Friday, about five minutes after I had my coat on and walking out the door. My manager ran up after me and asked me to walk with him to the HR office. I was told to hand in my badge. I wasn’t even permitted to go up and clean out my desk. The security staff did it for me.
I didn’t even get a severance package.
I was given a piece of paper that simply said that they would not contest my unemployment benefits.
(I had unknowingly trained my replacement(s). These were cheaper foreign H1B visa engineers out of India.)
This would of course ONLY happen as long as I agreed to leave quietly and not divulge anything that I knew to a competitor (for five years).
The NDA (Non-Disclosure / Compete Agreement) is a staple in the industry. It is used to silence employees and control what they do once they leave a company.
Living paycheck to paycheck sucks. You take what you need to take.
Working for someone during this time was one of scrambling to find a new job while your saving depletes. Then scurrying to learn the new job requirements, doing your best, and completing your project. Then, rinse and repeat.
Rinse and repeat.
Different companies, same story. In one, I was given an award for the “Most Valuable Employee” and had my picture taken and put into the newspaper. The day the paper hit the streets, I was let go. In another, while everyone gathering the pot-luck lunch for Christmas eve, my boss took me to his office and let me go. I didn’t even get a chance to eat with everyone else, and the dish that the tuna casserole that I brought in was never returned.
This was my story from the 1980’s into the first decade of this new century. It wasn’t until I started working for companies based outside of America did I start being treated like a valuable human again. In the USA, there are no employee protections. No matter what the law says. Functionally there are no protections.
Your experience might be different. I hear that companies in California care about their employees. They give them all kinds of "perks" to show their affection towards the staff. Like ping-pong tables, free sodas, and caramel latte coffees every morning with whole-wheat buttered toast with vegetarian spreads and guacamole.
Meanwhile, outside the USA, it is quite different.
Here is how Chinese companies reward high performers. They give them cold hard cash as tax-free bonuses. Those little bundles that she is handling out is around $12,000 USD to each person. The last time I received a bonus was when I was working in the coal mines. At that time it was equal to two weeks salary. Today, I never hear of American companies giving out year-end bonuses.
Watch. You’ll see the Chinese companies eat American companies alive. You can’t compete when you treat your star performers as disposable fast food containers.
The lesson here is simple. The only way that you can control your life is by yourself. Never. Never. NEVER expect a boss to give a rat’s ass about your life, your efforts, or your contributions. Be the boss or be a worker. There is no in-between.
Working for someone else is what losers do. A real man is his own boss. For it is better to be the boss of your tiny $5 empire, than to prostitute yourself for table scraps.
[1.5] Don’t expect to become rich overnight.
It’s not going to happen. Here’s a great article on this subject. Read it, but don’t get discouraged.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you. They are deceiving you for their very own personal gain. You will need to learn and experience some failures first. It’s how the system works.
So…
[2] Have Patience.
You need to go at your speed to achieve your goals. That is, more often nothing approaching “light-speed”.
Do not let your perceptions about the lifestyles of others force you to speed up or rush. It does not matter is people are getting rich off of “junk bonds” or “bit coin”. It’s none of your business if the Savings and Loans are making money hand over fist. Nor it it your business if your neighbor bought a new pick-up. Life is not a competition against others.
Life is not a competition.
All through school you are educated to compete against your classmates. Grades are put on a bell-shaped curve, and you need to be on the top of the curve to make a great life for yourself.
Nonsense.
Your life is controlled by your thoughts, actions and deeds. Be yourself, exactly as you are, and let the rest of the world burn in flames. It’s none of your business.
You be true to yourself, your family and your friends. The rest of the world can worry about the boy-scouts becoming the queer scouts. The rest of the world can worry about pleasing the boss. You have more important things on your mind. You have a life, live it well.
You have a life. It’s a short one. Live it well.
[3] When an Opportunity Comes – Take it, and don’t look back.
Opportunities do not come often, and yet when they do come, we find ourselves questioning ourselves. Don’t.
Stop. Make a full stop right here and right now. Listen to me. The best things that I have ever experienced in my life came when I took the opportunity that was presented to me.
Don’t be the old man who wishes that he would have gone out with the pretty girl who desperately wanted to eat pizza with him. Don’t be the sad loser who complains about the time when he should have invested in the “Cracker Barrel” restaurant chain or “Apple computers” when he had the chance. Don’t be the old man still talking about the “good old days” when he was the star quarterback in High School.
The difference between you and everyone else; the difference between a magnificent man, and an “average Joe” is one of degree. If you always take the safe road, the road that everyone else travels, then you will be…
Well, you will be just like everyone else.
When an opportunity comes, take it! Don’t look back. Grab it by the horns and give it every single ounce of energy that you have. Fight for your dream. Fight for the opportunity. Make your dreams happen. The spotlight is on you. Take the opportunity and ride it to personal perfection.
[4] Most success is through constant dedication and repetition.
You need to get good at something first, then expand on it. You just can’t go jumping from one project to the next. Pick ONE. Pick only one project and work at it. Work at it every day, constantly and tirelessly. Maybe your initial tries will be failures, but eventually you will become good enough at it.
This might mean long days, and long nights.
If you happen to have a “green thumb”, then keep at it. Learn about plants. Enjoy the soil, the nutrients and the joys of harvesting. If you happen to be employed flipping burgers, then be the best Gawd darn burger flipper in the industry. Flip those burgers over and over.
It doesn’t matter if your are making furniture in your home shop, or designing a computer system for the next stellar probe. Be the best at what you do. Keep at it, and don’t jump around. Many times you will be alone. Many times you will live a life that you “didn’t sign up for”. It doesn’t matter.
Plow forward. Never give up.
[5] Don’t get all caught up in having a “career”
Once you are fresh out of the military or out of school, you start to work “on your career”. Trust me, there’s nothing all that great about having a career.
Yes, there is a difference between a “career” and a “job”. A career is more like a ladder that you build upon, year after year. A job is a one-shot deal for exchanging your time for money.
The problem is that 90% of the managers and bosses in the United States will treat you as an employee working at a job (for them). While there will be some lip service given to “educational advancement”, it’s for the most part, just lip-service. What they really care about is whether or not you can provide a service for them at the lowest price possible. If they can get it done cheaper, without too much risk, they will replace you.
Thus, in the big picture, a career is just another word for a job.
The end game isn’t about all the degrees you have; all the certifications you carry, the patents you have or the papers your wrote. It doesn’t matter if you have twenty five years experience in designing windshield wipers for automobiles, or being an expert in the setting up of strip malls.
None of that matters.
What does matter is YOU. What does matter is your family. What does matter are your friends.
Never neglect your family, your friends, and most importantly, your health for a job, a career or a boss.
I had my first (and hopefully my last) heart attack when I was 35 years old. I worked in Shreveport, Louisiana for a tyrannical manager who placed impossible goals on all of us. His belief (quite popular at the time, and well-promoted in the professional media) was if you place an impossible goal, the workers will strive to attain it.
The only thing is, the goals really were physically impossible. And failure meant being fired.
You can scream and moan. You can threaten and cajole. You can throw chairs around in the conference room, and demand that people work until 10pm at night. None of that is going to change the fact that it physically takes a finite amount of time to hog out a plastic injection tool made out of P3 steel. Machines can only run so fast.
Now, here’s my little story.
At the time I was rushing, like everyone else to make the end of week mandatory meeting at 6pm. (These things lasted from one to three hours long, and were every Friday. We would finish the meeting, and then we would drag our asses back home at 9pm or so to our families. We would eat reheated supper plates in the microwave and then turn in from exhaustion.)
The manager insisted that the door to the meeting room be locked, and if you can’t make the meeting, a black mark was placed near your name. You didn’t want a black mark. Bad things happened to people with black marks.
At that time, I was involved a a pretty tricky reverse engineering of an electric powdered chainsaw, with an impossible implementation time line. As I was scrambling to leave the machine shop after working on a prototype, I suddenly felt like some giant pulled a string out of my heart. I collapsed on the floor and could not get my breath. I’ll never forget that feeling, and it scared the living shit out of me.
I went home. Went to the hospital during the weekend, and discovered that my heart was damaged by the attack. The doctor gave me some pills, and told me to take it easier, and do all the rest. yada yada yada. I rested up and then showed up for work on Monday as usual.
On Monday, when I came into work, the manager called me in his office and reamed me up and down. He even called in other co-workers to agree with him and this party of four people belittled me for hours. A weaker man would have given up. He would have said “Fuck it!”, and left.
But I had a sick wife. I could not afford to quit the job. So I stuck on.
All this being said. It was my fault for walking into this situation and dealing with it. There were other options that I could, and maybe should, have taken. But I didn’t take the alternatives. I thought that I could persevere and work everything out. I was wrong.
Don’t be like me. Prioritize you life, and no not allow anything to distract from your priorities.
You come first. Be healthy. You need to be physically, emotional, socially, and spiritually fit.
Family comes next. Take care of your immediate family, and then make sure that your secondary family members are not neglected.
Friends come after that. We are not lone wolves. We need community, church and friends. Cherish and cultivate these relationships. They are more important than we tend to realize.
Never forget what friends are for…
Prioritize the people in your life. Cherish and respect their importance. Take care of them, and they, in turn, will take care of you. We are not alone in the wilderness, we are part of a community. Take on and fulfill that role.
[6] Lunches are your time. Make them count.
Over the years, I have eaten a lifetime supply of fast food for lunch and then would sit in the car listening to the EIB network on the radio. I would drive the car to a shady spot, Eat my burger and fries. I would drink my cola and chill out.
I was wasting my time.
Life is too short to waste on fast food, or sub-standard meals. This is true whether it is a bag lunch made out of baloney sandwiches, or a fast food meal. Don’t skimp on YOUR time.
For lunch is YOUR time. Yes, I know that there are companies that insist that you “train” during lunches (like a few that I worked in while I lived in Boston), but this time is yours. Use it wisely.
Life is too short to eat substandard food.
One thing that I have learned over the years is that other nations don’t rush and wolf down fast food in order to come back after lunch on time. They take their time. They spend time with friends, co-workers or family. They take naps, and even drink and smoke during lunch.
Yeah. Imagine that!
Up until the 1970’s many American companies provided a free lunch to their workers. The workers could either eat at the company cafeteria or go out and get a bite at a local restaurant or bar. This was very common at the steel mills in Pittsburgh.
Then during the 1980’s many companies shut down or relocated to the Southern states. When they relocated, they cut out or severely curtailed the lunches that they provided. Additionally, they cut down the length of time for lunch. It went from two hours to one hour, and in many cases to a half an hour. It is no surprise that as companies reduced their lunch breaks, that there was a corresponding rise in the popularity of fast food establishments.
And, with the increase in fast food restaurants, and their diets, came an increase in national obesity. I guess that you could easily show a link between American’s diet and health problems and the degradation of the way workers were treated by companies
So, now you know.
Take care of yourself. Lunch is your time. Make it count. Have a good healthy meal, relax and rest. Instead of rushing about… Go to a restaurant. Order the special. Sit down. Relax. The food will be delivered to you and savor it. Then once you are finished, go to your car and take a nap for the remainder of your lunch break. Rest. This is your time. Never forget that.
[7] Things will always end
My father tried to tell me this when I was enduring a particularly bad low point in my life. Yet, it is true. No matter how bad things are, they will eventually change around. Yes, it might take years, and for some…decades, but they will turn around. The most important thing to realize is that you, as a man, must keep slugging though the storm.
This can mean a difficult day at the office, or a marriage that is on a bumpy road down hill. It can mean anything, but it is true. Our thoughts and our actions will eventually reach a point where they will say “enough is enough!”, and it will start to dissipate. Oh, maybe you the reader don’t know the connection that I am referring to. But, it is the truth. All things eventually end.
All things eventually end. That means the good and the bad.
Change is a staple of our life. Embrace it and learn that life is not static trench warfare with red and blue lines advancing and moving slowly over battle field maps. No. It is a a dynamic and constantly changing mish-mash of confusion, and it is your responsibility to keep your head level and above the fray.
Just remember that it will, some day, eventually end. It really will. Whether by exhaustion or you taking action to remove yourself from the situation. All things do end.
Keep in mind that maybe Forrest Gump was right that “Life is like a box of chocolates, you’ll never know what you’ll get”. You can change the box.
YOU can change THE box.
[8] When a friend offers you advice, take it.
I was once dating a phlebotomist in Boston. This gal collected the blood from people all over the area and sent it to the labs for testing. It’s a job, and she did it well.
Well, one day, for fun she was showing me how to sample and take blood. We sampled from her arm and then we sampled from my arm. The thing is, that when we sampled from my arm, the blood (once it settled out) was not all red with a little bit of white at the bottom. No. It was about 75% white with about 25% red.
She looked at it. And, again. She looked at it and studied it. She said that in all the years of her sampling blood, she had never seen that happen.
She thought about it, and said “this isn’t right“.
So she sampled again, and then a third time. In all cases, my blood would be mostly white with only a smaller portion that would be red. She kept on saying…”this isn’t right.“.
She told me that I should see a doctor. I said, “Hey I feel fine.” and left it at that.
The next day after work she asked me if I saw a doctor, and I told her that I didn’t need to see one. So, she huffed and told me to get into the car, and she drove me to the emergency room, and told the doctor what was going on and showed them the tube with the blood sample.
They set me down and drew some blood, and then after looking at the results, immediately took more samples. They moved me to a room off the ICU and put me on emergency medicines and I had to spend three days in observation.
It turned out that I had a rare condition. (Who’d figure?) I had a thing called “hyperviscosity syndrome”. (One like THIS guy had.)
Yeah, I got all fixed up. I was told to severely change the way I ate, and to lower my stress levels. That eventually (with many starts and stops) set me down the road to “Fuck you! Take this job and shove it. Be a human or not, It’s not my problem anymore.”
Businessmen hire high-performers and demand 200% performance 100% of the time. But that is never realistic. I don't know what they are teaching at universities today, but the crop of MBA's out in the industry in the 1990's were really out of touch with human interaction.
Anyways…
When a friend tells you something important, then you have to listen to them. When someone you care about tells you that you need to change your hairstyle, appearance or clothing… listen. And, when a loved one wants you to go to the hospital…you friggin’ go!
[9] Don’t act you age
All my life, I was told to “act my age”. This was something that my father wanted to instill in me. He wanted me to be mature, serious and a “good young man”. Nonsense! He was wrong.
I did things his way for the longest time. What did I get out of it? Well, I got a heart attack, clogged arteries, a fine average life working for tyrannical bosses and being laid off suddenly every year or so.
Fuck. That.
So I leaned how to ballroom dance. I learned how to paint in oils and paint figurines and nudes. I learned how to write poetry. I learned how to enjoy and taste food. I learned that singing a song, drinking wine and just being playful was enormously attractive to beautiful women.
Smile and have fun.
Incorporate elements of play into everything that you do. Make your projects into “games”. Stop being so serious. Turn exercises into fun dance routines.
I started enjoying life more, and when I did so, my health got better. My enjoyment of life increased exponentially, and I became notable and (dare I say it) popular.
People want to be around happy, relaxed people. People want some sunshine in their lives. People need to feel connections with others. This is your life. Make it count.
If you are 40 years old and want to build a tree house. Do it! If you are lonely, and always wanted to meet women, learn how to dance. And… finally….
Don’t act your age. Act how you want to act, and to Hell with everyone else. If you want to play, then play. If you want to work and build up a life, then do so. If you want to sing, dance drink wine and carouse with girls, then have at it. And… If you want to succeed in business, act and behave like you are 35 and full of piss and vinegar.
[10] Learn to identify threats
When we are born and grow up in our own individual families we are taught that the way we live is “normal”. Anything outside of that is either abnormal, or an improvement of our accustomed norm. Later, when we attended school we were taught that everyone was different and that everyone had their own ways of doing things. Yet, there was always one “best way” to do something. And the school taught us that “best” way.
All of this is nonsense.
I think that we need to look at our life in a different way. We need to think in terms of a “starting place” that can be improved or subtracted from. What we want is for our life to constantly improve. What we want to avoid is having things subtracted from our life.
Anything that takes away from our life is a threat.
Looking at life like that is clearer and cleaner. There is no “absolute” best. There is only “your best” and “your ideal”, and you compare everything to your needs, your experiences, and your desires.
This way of looking at things enables us to divorce ourselves from the land of grey, and go into the cleaner black and white reality. As such we can identify threats and related problems before they become enormous problems that would eventually consume us and change us in ways that we do not want to have happen.
Look at things in stark black vs. white. If things are in shades of grey, you identify the dividing line, and keep everything simple on YOUR terms. As such, using this method you can easily identify friends and foes. It is absolutely critical that you master this. That way, you can avoid threats to your life, in every aspect. Make no exceptions.
Bonus Advice
The rest of the world is living life. They are growing. They are advancing and they are living life. We are all far too caught up in our “American bubble of reality” to see what it is like outside. We think the world is a dark and evil place. But that is not the case at all.
While the American news is all full of the (so called) “saber rattling” of China, and the terrible Tariffs that the great Russian spy – Donald J. Trump is, the rest of the world is just moving forward oblivious to the internal propaganda inside the USA.
The rest of the world is living life. They are growing. They are having fun. They are enjoying the nice blue skies and eating fine food. They are spending time with pretty girls and having a great time drinking wine and singing.
Life is not a prison.
Get out of the mainstream American news media narrative. Both liberal and conservative. Experience life on your terms.
The rest of the world is living life. You should as well. This is your life. LIVE IT WELL.
Conclusion
Yes, if I had a time machine, I would NOT advise myself to get absolutely rich.
That is a direction for fools. If I went in that direction, I would have a “successful life, full of plenty“, but it would not be a “rich, colorful life”. You want a happy life. Who cares how you got there. All that matters is that you are enjoying life to it’s fullest.
I think that I am far happier as I am now. Now, that I have experienced the highs and lows of life.
A person who spends every day in paradise soon takes it for granted. While a person who visits it is enthralled by the scents, moments and elements that are present. The only way that we can appreciate the life that we have is to suffer from the highs and lows.
My advice to myself is pretty basic;
Eat delicious, high quality food.
Drink some wine while you are at it.
Take your time, enjoy the moments.
Sing, laugh, dance.
Surround yourself with friends, listen to them.
Bad times come and go.
Have patience and enjoy the “now”.
Look for opportunities and take them when they appear.
Get good at doing what you love.
Forget about having a career. It’s a big-assed lie.
Have fun and act however you want to.
Be your own boss and do things on your own terms.
Don’t be afraid of anything.
Stay away from threats and bad people.
Yeah, I know it sounds like a list that you would find on any of those click-bait sites. But it is all true.
So…
Why aren’t you out fishing right now? Why did you have a burger from the big fast food chain instead of one at the local diner? Why, in God’s name, did you even bother to check the news on the internet? Why didn’t you ask that pretty girl out for lunch? When was the last time you enjoyed a bottle of wine?
Life is too short. Don’t waste it.
.
.
Quick interlude about Huawei…
Oh, and by the way… while I am at it.
You know that stuff about Huawei, right? Canada arrested the boss of Huawei and carted them off to America for this reason or that. In return, China warned Canada that there would be consequences. And now American companies are going to show China. They are going to teach China a lesson. Right?
Well, watch out.
Not… “watch out” and see what happens. I mean (screaming) “WATCH OUT!!!!” as a cement truck comes barreling towards you.
The Chinese don’t mess around.
If you want to pick a fight then you had best be prepared. The Chinese plan for decades, while American companies plan on short term profits. While American trains are using 1950’s technology, the Chinese are using modern high-tech bullet trains. While American NASA is going to capture an asteroid the size of a dishwasher sometime before 2030, the Chinese are already building the components for their moon bases.
Heck! America can’t even build a wall on it’s own sovereign soil.
The companies that treat their workers as humans, instead of pawns in a huge money-making industry will ALWAYS win in the long run. That’s the secret of why Apple was able to recover when Steve Jobs was asked to return. The best companies to work for are also the ones that treat the workers as humans. Not as some kind of pawn, or mindless working drone.
If the USA wants to play a game using Huawei leadership as a political pawn, then Americans should expect the consequences. Listen to me. The Chinese do not mess around.
The Chinese do not mess around.
They are a serious and capable nation run by intelligent people who are not handicapped by socially progressive baggage or political infighting. While the American companies have meetings with “Diversity Managers” to plan how to advance their agenda in the next four months, the Chinese companies are working on another level entirely.
And now, America wants to mess around with Huawei, the current global leader in wireless telephony. All I can say is you have no idea what a shit-storm you have started. The top-line high-performers are taking this threat seriously, and they will not tire. They will not give up. They will be ruthless in their response.
China is always being under estimated. People laughed when they said that they would put a man in orbit. People laughed when they said that they would construct the “silk road”. People laughed when they said that they would convert all their passenger trains to bullet trains. People laughed when they said that they would dominate global electronics manufacture.
Oh look HERE, I’m right. China is going to construct a California-sized “Chinese Silicon Valley” in the Shenzhen – Guangdong region. How about that for a response?
I, for one, am not laughing. American T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon will all be a footnote in the annuals of market dominance. And, you can all thank the American Deep State for making it happen.
Anyways… sorry about that.
Final Comments – Private Responses
Since I posted this, I received a number of private messages that took offense to my digression about Huawei. They argue that Huawei was the global leader in wireless telephony because they stole from US industry.
Sigh. I feel like I am alone in the world trying to warn everyone about this. Heck! no one cares. It’s almost like the football team that is convinced that it will win the Superbowl because they were champions back in the 1970’s. It’s that silly.
Well, my comment on that is simple.
If your company is founded on the theft of technology, at best the most you can ever achieve is to match the capabilities of the company that you stole from. You would not exceed them unless you were doing something quite different.
Huawei is not the global leader in telephony because they copied. They are there because they innovated and did things differently. Though, the acquisition of American firms, I am certain, played a role. As well as hiring top American talent and paying them well.
But, that’s all specious.
American industry is failing. The American government is failing, and in the globe, the Chinese industry WILL dominate. Check out these two videos. You don’t have to like it. As I stated in this post. Change is natural. Accept it or not.
The rise of China over the last two decades…
The rise of China today leading into the next decade. But, not to worry. American industry is getting ready for this. They are hiring “diversity officers” and paying them enormous amounts to assure that racial quotas and progressive values will guide and lead American industry. Just like they lead the Former Soviet Union and make Soviet technology well-known the world over! Yessur!
The idea that Strength through diversity will radically transform American industry and make it…
"While we bicker over which pronouns to use, the Chinese are preparing to assume leadership of the world. As more and more technical and scientific literature is published in Chinese, this trend will accelerate. "
-3/9/2019, 10:39:54 PM by beef
Posts Regarding Life and Contentment
Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this
post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss
growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with
the society within communist China. As there are some really stark
differences between the two.
More Posts about Life
I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified
about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that
are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a
personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome
to come and enjoy a read or two as well.